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Benjamin's Passages: Dreaming, Awakening
Contributor(s): Gelley, Alexander (Author)
ISBN: 082326257X     ISBN-13: 9780823262571
Publisher: Fordham University Press
OUR PRICE:   $34.20  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Published: December 2014
Qty:
Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | European - German
- Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory
- Philosophy
Dewey: 838.912
LCCN: 2014029447
Physical Information: 0.6" H x 6" W x 8.9" (0.70 lbs) 232 pages
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Walter Benjamin projected a macroscosmic journey of the individual sleeper to the dreaming collective, which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides. Benjamin's effort to transpose the dream
phenomenon to the history of a collective remained fragmentary, though it underlies the principle of retrograde temporality, which, it is argued, is central to his idea of history.

The passages are not just the Paris arcades: They refer also to Benjamin's effort to negotiate the labyrinth of his work and thought. Gelley works through many of Benjamin's later works and examines important critical questions: the interplay of aesthetics and politics, the genre of The Arcades
Project, citation, language, messianism, aura, and the motifs of memory, the crowd, and awakening.

For Benjamin, memory is not only antiquarian; it functions as a solicitation, a call to a collectivity to come. Gelley reads this call in the motif of awakening, which conveys a qualified but crucial performative intention of Benjamin's undertaking.


Contributor Bio(s): Gelley, Alexander: - Alexander Gelley is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.