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One-Way Street
Contributor(s): Benjamin, Walter (Author), Jennings, Michael W. (Editor), Jephcott, Edmund (Translator)
ISBN: 0674052293     ISBN-13: 9780674052291
Publisher: Belknap Press
OUR PRICE:   $17.10  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Language: German
Published: May 2016
Qty:
Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory
- Literary Criticism | European - German
- Philosophy | Aesthetics
Dewey: 838.912
LCCN: 2015039382
Physical Information: 0.6" H x 4.9" W x 7.3" (0.30 lbs) 144 pages
Themes:
- Cultural Region - Germany
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:

One-Way Street is a thoroughfare unlike anything else in literature--by turns exhilarating and bewildering, requiring mental agility and a special kind of urban literacy. Presented here in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation on the semiotics of late-1920s Weimar culture offers a fresh opportunity to encounter Walter Benjamin at his most virtuosic and experimental, writing in a vein that anticipates later masterpieces such as "On the Concept of History" and The Arcades Project.

Composed of sixty short prose pieces that vary wildly in style and theme, One-Way Street evokes a dense cityscape of shops, cafes, and apartments, alive with the hubbub of social interactions and papered over with public inscriptions of all kinds: advertisements, signs, posters, slogans. Benjamin avoids all semblance of linear narrative, enticing readers with a seemingly random sequence of aphorisms, reminiscences, jokes, off-the-cuff observations, dreamlike fantasias, serious philosophical inquiries, apparently unserious philosophical parodies, and trenchant political commentaries. Providing remarkable insight into the occluded meanings of everyday things, Benjamin time and again proves himself the unrivalled interpreter of what he called "the soul of the commodity."

Despite the diversity of its individual sections, Benjamin's text is far from formless. Drawing on the avant-garde aesthetics of Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism, its unusual construction implies a practice of reading that cannot be reduced to simple formulas. Still refractory, still radical, One-Way Street is a work in perpetual progress.


Contributor Bio(s): Benjamin, Walter: - Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was the author of many works of literary and cultural analysis.Jennings, Michael W.: - Michael W. Jennings is Class of 1900 Professor of Modern Languages at Princeton University.Marcus, Greil: - Greil Marcus is the author of The Doors, Mystery Train, and other books.