Benjamin's library : modernity, nation, and the Baroque / Jane O. Newman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Newman, Jane O.

, Cornell University Library, Author.

Contributor:

funder.

Series:

Signale (Ithaca, N.Y.)

Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940--Criticism and interpretation.

Benjamin, Walter.

Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940--Contributions in criticism.

German literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

German literature.

Baroque literature--History and criticism.

Baroque literature.

Germany--Intellectual life.

Germany.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (261 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press : Cornell University Library, 2011.

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2011]

Language Note:

English

Biography/History:

Jane O. Newman is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Pastoral Conventions: Poetry, Language, and Thought in Seventeenth-Century Nuremberg and The Intervention of Philology: Gender, Learning, and Power in Lohenstein's Roman Plays.

Summary:

In Benjamin's Library, Jane O. Newman offers, for the first time in any language, a reading of Walter Benjamin's notoriously opaque work, Origin of the German Tragic Drama that systematically attends to its place in discussions of the Baroque in Benjamin's day. Taking into account the literary and cultural contexts of Benjamin's work, Newman recovers Benjamin's relationship to the ideologically loaded readings of the literature and political theory of the seventeenth-century Baroque that abounded in Germany during the political and economic crises of the Weimar years.To date, the significance of the Baroque for Origin of the German Tragic Drama has been glossed over by students of Benjamin, most of whom have neither read it in this context nor engaged with the often incongruous debates about the period that filled both academic and popular texts in the years leading up to and following World War I. Armed with extraordinary historical, bibliographical, philological, and orthographic research, Newman shows the extent to which Benjamin participated in these debates by reconstructing the literal and figurative history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books that Benjamin analyzes and the literary, art historical and art theoretical, and political theological discussions of the Baroque with which he was familiar. In so doing, she challenges the exceptionalist, even hagiographic, approaches that have become common in Benjamin studies. The result is a deeply learned book that will infuse much-needed life into the study of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Textual Note

Introduction: Benjamin's Baroque: A Lost Object?

1. Inventing the Baroque: A Critical History of Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Debates

2. The Plays Are the Thing: Textual Politics and the German Drama

3. Melancholy Germans: War Theology, Allegory, and the Lutheran Baroque

Conclusion: Baroque Legacies: National Socialism's Benjamin

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

CC BY-NC-ND

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780801461361

0801461367

9780801460883

0801460883

OCLC:

769190454

Access Restriction:

Open access Unrestricted online access