The Actuality of Walter Benjamin - Softcover

This collection shows how extraordinarily substantial were the theoretical footholds which Walter Benjamin supplied. The contributors engage with Benjamin on a number of levels, with essays on historical understanding versus historicism, a look at gender and dialectical images, the space of the city, the sources of Judaism and the aesthetics of conflict. Also analysed are Benjamin's artwork, the novel, the anthropology and philosophy of history, 'fate and character', the baroque and Benjamin the intellectual.

The boundaries of Walter Benjamin's work still resist classification and demarcation. His writings, including the best-known collection, Illuminations, remain an uneasy but thrilling combination of the actual and the mystical, of Marxism and the messianic utopianism.

This collection shows how extraordinarily substantial were the footholds which Benjamin supplied: Irving Wohlfarth takes up the troubling question of historical understanding versus historicism in his essay The Actuality of Walter Benjamin. Also included are essays on Benjamin and the sources of Judaism, feminism and cultural analysis, and images in Benjamin's novels and other writings.