本雅明在他的d峰工作到最后,完善了他的大众传媒理论,并在他的论文《在技术再现的时代的艺术作品》的最终版本中达到d峰。这本书中还包括他在去世前完成的颇具影响力的作品《论历史概念》(On the Concept of History)。这本书的卓越之处在于它对“现代”的本质的探究(尤其是波德莱尔所揭示的),它关于艺术的变形和历史的根本不连续性的观点,以及它在野蛮时期的人性生活和思想的例子。整个收藏品雄辩地证明了人类在围城中不屈不挠的精神。
“Every line we succeed in publishing today…is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness.” So wrote Walter Benjamin in January 1940. Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to flee the Nazis. However insistently the idea of catastrophe hangs over Benjamin’s writings in the final years of his life, the “victories wrested” in this period nonetheless constitute some of the most remarkable twentieth-century analyses of the emergence of modern society. The essays on Charles Baudelaire are the distillation of a lifetime of thinking about the nature of modernity. They record the crisis of meaning experienced by a civilization sliding into the abyss, even as they testify to Benjamin’s own faith in the written word.
This volume ranges from studies of Baudelaire, Brecht, and the historian Carl Jochmann to appraisals of photography, film, and poetry. At their core is the question of how art can survive and thrive in a tumultuous time. Here we see Benjamin laying out an ethic for the critic and artist—a subdued but resilient heroism. At the same time, he was setting forth a sociohistorical account of how art adapts in an age of violence and repression.
Working at the height of his powers to the very end, Benjamin refined his theory of the mass media that culminated in the final version of his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Also included in this volume is his influential piece “On the Concept of History,” completed just before his death. The book is remarkable for its inquiry into the nature of “the modern” (especially as revealed in Baudelaire), for its ideas about the transmogrification of art and the radical discontinuities of history, and for its examples of humane life and thought in the midst of barbarism. The entire collection is eloquent testimony to the indomitable spirit of humanity under siege.
目录
Fruits of Exile, 1938 (Part 2)
Theory of Remembrance, 1939
Materialist Theology, 1940
A Note on the Texts
Chronology, 1938–1940
List of Writings in Volumes 1–4
Index
作者简介
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was the author of many works of literary and cultural analysis.
Howard Eiland is an editor and translator of Walter Benjamin’s writings.
Michael W. Jennings is Class of 1900 Professor of Modern Languages at Princeton University.
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