Main Constellations of Reading: Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality
Constellations of Reading: Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality cover

Constellations of Reading: Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality

5.0 / 5.0
0 comments
How to read Walter Benjamin today? This book argues that the proper way is through an approach which recognizes and respects his own peculiar theorization of the act of reading and the politics of interpretation that this entails. The approach must be figural, that is, focused on images, and driven by the notion of actualization. Figural reading, in the very sui generis Benjaminian way, understands figures as constellations, whereby an image of the past juxtaposes them with an image of the present and is thus actualized. To apply this method to Benjamin's own work means first to identify some figures. The book singles out the Flâneur, the Detective, the Prostitute and the Ragpicker, and then sets them alongside a contemporary account of the same figure: the Flâneur in Juan Goytisolo's Landscapes after the Battle (1982), the Detective in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (1987), the Prostitute in Dacia Maraini's Dialogue between a Prostitute and her Client (1973), and the Ragpicker in Mudrooroo's The Mudrooroo/Müller Project (1993). The book thereby, on the one hand, analyses the politics of reading Benjamin today and, on the other, sets his work against a variety of contemporary aesthetics and politics of interpretation.
Request Code : ZLIBIO3705471
Categories:
Year:
2008
Publisher:
Peter Lang UK
Language:
English
Pages:
392
ISBN 10:
3039118609
ISBN 13:
9783039118601
ISBN:
3039118609,9783039118601
Series:
Cultural History and Literary Imagination; 13

Comments of this book

There are no comments yet.