Walter Benjamin: The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940 (1994)

22 September 2012, dusan

“Called “the most important critic of his time” by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin has only become more influential over the years, as his work has assumed a crucial place in current debates over the interactions of art, culture, and meaning. A “natural and extraordinary talent for letter writing was one of the most captivating facets of his nature,” writes Gershom Scholem in his Foreword to this volume; and Benjamin’s correspondence reveals the evolution of some of his most powerful ideas, while also offering an intimate picture of Benjamin himself and the times in which he lived.

Writing at length to Scholem and Theodor Adorno, and exchanging letters with Rainer Maria Rilke, Hannah Arendt, Max Brod, and Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin elaborates on his ideas about metaphor and language. He reflects on literary figures from Kafka to Karl Kraus, and expounds his personal attitudes toward such subjects as Marxism and French national character. Providing an indispensable tool for any scholar wrestling with Benjamin’s work, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940 is a revelatory look at the man behind much of the twentieth century’s most significant criticism.”

Edited and Annotated by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno
Translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1994
ISBN 0226042375, 9780226042374
674 pages

Publisher

PDF (removed on 2015-11-15 upon request of the publisher)

Theodor W. Adorno: Adorno: The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture (1994)

18 September 2010, dusan

The Stars Down to Earth shows us a stunningly prescient Adorno. Haunted by the ugly side of American culture industries he used the different angles provided by each of these three essays to showcase the dangers inherent in modern obsessions with consumption. He engages with some of his most enduring themes in this seminal collection, focusing on the irrational in mass culture – from astrology to new age cults, from anti-semitism to the power of neo-fascist propaganda. He points out that the modern state and market forces serve the interest of capital in its basic form. Stephan Crook’s introduction grounds Adorno’s arguments firmly in the present where extreme religious and political organizations are commonplace – so commonplace in fact that often we deem them unworthy of our attention. Half a century ago Theodore Adorno not only recognised the dangers, but proclaimed them loudly. We did not listen then. Maybe it is not too late to listen now.

Edited with an Introduction by Stephen Crook
Publisher Routledge, 1994
Routledge classics
ISBN 0415105684, 9780415105682
176 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2013-6-6)