Name: The Benjamin Files
SKU: 54042132
Price: 785.00 TWD
Availability: InStock
Author: Fredric Jameson
ISBN: 9781839765575

Type

Physical Book

Author

Fredric Jameson

Publisher

Verso

Year

2022

Language

English

Pages

272

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

21.1x14.2x2 cm

Weight

0.25 kg.

ISBN13

9781839765575

Synopsis "The Benjamin Files"

Jameson's first full-length engagement with Walter Benjamin's work. The Benjamin Files offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters. Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-philosophical, anti-systematic thinker whose conceptual interests also felt the gravitational pull of his vocation as a writer. What resulted was a coexistence or variety of language fields and thematic codes which overlapped and often seemed to contradict each other: a view which will allow us to clarify the much-debated tension in his works between the mystical or theological side of Benjamin and his political or historical inclination. The three-way tug of war over his heritage between adherents of his friends Scholem, Adorno and Brecht, can also be better grasped from this position, which gives the Brechtian standpoint more due than most influential academic studies. Benjamin's corpus is an anticipation of contemporary theory in the priority it gives language and representation over philosophical or conceptual unity; and its political motivations are clarified by attention to the omnipresence of History throughout his writing, from the shortest articles to the most ambitious projects. His explicit program--"to transfer the crisis into the heart of language" or, in other words, to detect class struggle at work in the most minute literary phenomena--requires the reader to translate the linguistic or representational literary issues that concerned him back into the omnipresent but often only implicitly political ones. But the latter are those of another era, to which we must gain access, to use one of Benjamin's favorite expressions.

Fredric Jameson

(Author)

View Author's Page

Fredric Jameson (1934–2024) was an influential American literary critic and Marxist theorist, known for his analysis of contemporary culture and its relationship with late capitalism. He earned his PhD from Yale with a thesis on Sartre and taught at universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Duke. His methodological approach combined Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis, addressing issues like postmodernism and cultural production in the globalized era. In 2008, he received the prestigious Holberg Prize for his outstanding contribution to the study of the relationships between social formations and cultural forms.

Among his most notable works are Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Theories of Postmodernity (1996), The Seeds of Time (2000), A Singular Modernity (2002), Archaeologies of the Future (2009), and The Realism and the Providential Novel (2006). The latter, published by the Circle of Fine Arts, examines narrative structures in Western literature, from Heliodorus to George Eliot, and suggests that happy endings are a literary rather than existential category. His work falls within the genre of critical essay and literary theory, and has left an indelible mark on contemporary cultural and literary studies.

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