On Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. Sponsored by City Lights Books

A whole week of activities celebrating the new authoratative biography of Walter Benjamin by Howard Eiland, MIT Literature, and Michael Jennings, Prof German, Princeton University, with Lindsay Waters, Ed Humanities, Harvard University Press. Went to conversation  5-7 p,  at UCBerkeley with the authors, editors and Harvard University Press representative.

 Biography has been writtten, not as a montage but to elucidate the critical writings and will prove an essential reference and research tool for scholars of Walter Benjamin was the conclusion.   (  Early life, all was rejected and he was tortured by no acclaim and no publisher for his work.  Then, the protean ability of him to change viewpoints, etc through his life. )

”Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings have given us a portrait of this elusive but paradigmatic thinker that deserves to be ranked among the few truly indispensable intellectual biographies of the modern era.  I am tempted to call it a masterpiece.”  Peter Gordon, The New Republic.

The book includes:  The Arcades Project, Berlin Childhood Around 1900, On Hashish, Early Writings 1910-1917.  ...and the four volumes of the Selected Writings.
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The Arcades Project, written between 1927 and 1940, encompassed one of the largest collections of writings on Parisian life in the 19th century and focussed on the iron and glass covered arcades.  "   Walter Benjamin was one of the twentieth century's most important intellectuals.  His pioneering studies of modern media and critique of commodity capitalism proved him a visionary who could foresee the effects of modernity on culture. Judith Wechsler has done a film "The Passages of Walter Benjamin" which will debut  at the Mechanics Institute this evening.

Other programs are at Goethe Insitute and San Francisco Art Institute.   Details:  www.hauntedreflections.net