Reflections

Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings

Walter Benjamin, Peter Demetz

• Publisher: Mariner Books Classics
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780547711164
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The towering twentieth century thinker delve into literature, philosophy, and his own life experience in this "extraordinary collection" ( Publishers Weekly ). A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin's writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin. Benjamin moves seamlessly from literary criticism to autobiography to philosophical-theological speculations, cementing his reputation as one of the greatest and most versatile writers of the twentieth century. "This book is just that: reflections of a highly polished mind that uncannily approximate the century's fragments of shattered traditions." — Time

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Introduction by Peter Demetz
• One
• A Berlin Chronicle
• One-way Street
• Two
• Moscow
• Marseilles
• Hashish in Marseilles
• Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century
• Naples
• Three
• Surrealism
• Brecht’s Threepenny Novel
• Conversations with Brecht
• The Author as Producer
• Karl Kraus
• Four
• Critique of Violence
• The Destructive Character
• Fate and Character
• Theologico-political Fragment
• On Language as Such and on the Language of Man
• On the Mimetic Faculty
• Editor’s Note
• Index of Names
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH
• Footnotes