Benjamin's Passages

Benjamin's Passages PDF Author: Alexander Gelley
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823262588
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Walter Benjamin projected a “macroscosmic journey” of the individual sleeper to “the dreaming collective, which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides.” Benjamin’s effort to transpose the dream phenomenon to the history of a collective remained fragmentary, though it underlies the principle of retrograde temporality, which, it is argued, is central to his idea of history. The “passages” are not just the Paris arcades: They refer also to Benjamin’s effort to negotiate the labyrinth of his work and thought. Gelley works through many of Benjamin’s later works and examines important critical questions: the interplay of aesthetics and politics, the genre of The Arcades Project, citation, language, messianism, aura, and the motifs of memory, the crowd, and awakening. For Benjamin, memory is not only antiquarian; it functions as a solicitation, a call to a collectivity to come. Gelley reads this call in the motif of awakening, which conveys a qualified but crucial performative intention of Benjamin’s undertaking.

Benjamin's Passages

Benjamin's Passages PDF Author: Alexander Gelley
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823262588
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Walter Benjamin projected a “macroscosmic journey” of the individual sleeper to “the dreaming collective, which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides.” Benjamin’s effort to transpose the dream phenomenon to the history of a collective remained fragmentary, though it underlies the principle of retrograde temporality, which, it is argued, is central to his idea of history. The “passages” are not just the Paris arcades: They refer also to Benjamin’s effort to negotiate the labyrinth of his work and thought. Gelley works through many of Benjamin’s later works and examines important critical questions: the interplay of aesthetics and politics, the genre of The Arcades Project, citation, language, messianism, aura, and the motifs of memory, the crowd, and awakening. For Benjamin, memory is not only antiquarian; it functions as a solicitation, a call to a collectivity to come. Gelley reads this call in the motif of awakening, which conveys a qualified but crucial performative intention of Benjamin’s undertaking.

Benjamin's Passages

Benjamin's Passages PDF Author: Alexander Gelley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823262564
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Benjamin's Passages: Dreaming, Awakening is focused on central issues of Benjamin's later work: the interplay of aesthetics and politics; the conception of language; the fading of aura and its relation to image; citation in The Arcades Project; the status of messianism; the motifs of memory, the crowd, and awakening.

Walter Benjamin's Passages

Walter Benjamin's Passages PDF Author: Pierre Missac
Publisher: Springer Science & Business
ISBN: 9780262631754
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Taking a cue from his subject, Missac adopts a form of indirect critique in which independent details examined seemingly in passing emerge over the course of the book as parts of larger patterns of understanding.

Passages

Passages PDF Author: Elizabeth Kovach
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1800083181
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
The study of literature and culture is marked by various distinct understandings of passages – both as phenomena and critical concepts. These include the anthropological notion of rites of passage, the shopping arcades (Passagen) theorized by Walter Benjamin, the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade, present-day forms of migration and resettlement, and understandings of translation and adaptation. Whether structural, semiotic, spatial/geographic, temporal, existential, societal or institutional, passages refer to processes of (status) change. They enable entrances and exits, arrivals and departures, while they also foster moments of liminality and suspension. They connect and thereby engender difference. Passages is an exploration of passages as contexts and processes within which liminal experiences and encounters are situated. It aims to foster a concept-based, interdisciplinary dialogue on how to approach and theorize such a term. Based on the premise that concepts travel through times, contexts and discursive settings, a conceptual approach to passages provides the authors of this volume with the analytical tools to (re-)focus their research questions and create a meaningful exchange across disciplinary, national and linguistic boundaries. Contributions from senior scholars and early-career researchers whose work focuses on areas such as cultural memory, performativity, space, media, (cultural) translation, ecocriticism, gender and race utilize specific understandings of passages and liminality, reflecting on their value and limits for their research.

Toward the Critique of Violence

Toward the Critique of Violence PDF Author: Walter Benjamin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503627683
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context. With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion—Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.

Financial Passages

Financial Passages PDF Author: Benjamin Stein
Publisher: Doubleday Books
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description


Cogent Science in Context

Cogent Science in Context PDF Author: William Rehg
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262264463
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
A proposal for an interdisciplinary, context-sensitive framework for assessing the strength of scientific arguments that melds Jürgen Habermas's discourse theory and sociological contextualism. Recent years have seen a series of intense, increasingly acrimonious debates over the status and legitimacy of the natural sciences. These “science wars” take place in the public arena—with current battles over evolution and global warming—and in academia, where assumptions about scientific objectivity have been called into question. Given these hostilities, what makes a scientific claim merit our consideration? In Cogent Science in Context, William Rehg examines what makes scientific arguments cogent—that is, strong and convincing—and how we should assess that cogency. Drawing on the tools of argumentation theory, Rehg proposes a multidimensional, context-sensitive framework both for understanding the cogency of scientific arguments and for conducting cooperative interdisciplinary assessments of the cogency of actual scientific arguments. Rehg closely examines Jürgen Habermas's argumentation theory and its implications for understanding cogency, applying it to a case from high-energy physics. A series of problems, however, beset Habermas's approach. In response, Rehg outlines his own “critical contextualist” approach, which uses argumentation-theory categories in a new and more context-sensitive way inspired by ethnography of science.

On Hashish

On Hashish PDF Author: Walter Benjamin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674022218
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
On Hashish' is Walter Benjamin's posthumous collection of writings, providing a unique and intimate portrait of the man himself, of his experiences of hashish, and also of his views on the Weimar Republic.

Walter Benjamin's Grave

Walter Benjamin's Grave PDF Author: Michael Taussig
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226790002
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
In September 1940, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou on the Spanish-French border when it appeared that he and his travelling partners would be denied passage into Spain in their attempt to escape the Nazis. In 2002, one of anthropology’s—and indeed today’s—most distinctive writers, Michael Taussig, visited Benjamin’s grave in Port Bou. The result is “Walter Benjamin’s Grave,” a moving essay about the cemetery, eyewitness accounts of Benjamin’s border travails, and the circumstances of his demise. It is the most recent of eight revelatory essays collected in this volume of the same name. “Looking over these essays written over the past decade,” writes Taussig, “I think what they share is a love of muted and defective storytelling as a form of analysis. Strange love indeed; love of the wound, love of the last gasp.” Although thematically these essays run the gamut—covering the monument and graveyard at Port Bou, discussions of peasant poetry in Colombia, a pact with the devil, the peculiarities of a shaman’s body, transgression, the disappearance of the sea, New York City cops, and the relationship between flowers and violence—each shares Taussig’s highly individual brand of storytelling, one that depends on a deep appreciation of objects and things as a way to retrieve even deeper philosophical and anthropological meanings. Whether he finds himself in Australia, Colombia, Manhattan, or Spain, in the midst of a book or a beach, whether talking to friends or staring at a monument, Taussig makes clear through these marvelous essays that materialist knowledge offers a crucial alternative to the increasingly abstract, globalized, homogenized, and digitized world we inhabit. Pursuing an adventure that is part ethnography, part autobiography, and part cultural criticism refracted through the object that is Walter Benjamin’s grave, Taussig, with this collection, provides his own literary memorial to the twentieth century’s greatest cultural critic.

Conversational Narrative

Conversational Narrative PDF Author: Neal R. Norrick
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027237101
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
This book investigates the forms and functions of storytelling in everyday conversation. It develops a rhetoric of everyday storytelling through an integrated approach to both the internal structure and the contextual integration of narrative passages. It aims at a more complete picture of oral narrative through analysis of a wider range of natural data, including personal anecdotes told for humor, put-down stories told for self-aggrandizement, family stories retold to ratify membership and so on, as well as marginal stories and narrative-like passages to delineate the boundaries of conversational storytelling and to test the analytical techniques proposed.Using transcriptions of stories from everyday talk, Norrick explores disfluencies, formulaicity and repetition as teller strategies and listener cues alongside global phenomena such as retelling and narrative macrostructures. He also extends his analysis to narrative jokes from conversation and to narrative passages in drama, namely Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet" and Beckett's "Endgame."