Download or read book Understanding Brecht written by Walter Benjamin and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2024-08-13 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays of political philosophy by the renowned mid 20th-century critical theorist and literary critic The relationship between philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin and playwright-poet Bertolt Brecht was both a lasting friendship and a powerful intellectual partnership. Having met in the late 1920s in Germany, Benjamin and Brecht, both independently minded Marxists with a deep understanding of and passionate commitment to the emancipatory potential of cultural practices, continued to discuss, argue and correspond on topics as varied as Fascism and the work of Franz Kafka. Faced by the onset of the ‘midnight of the century’, with the Nazi subversion of the Weimar Republic in Germany and the Stalinist degeneration of the revolution in Russia, both men, in their own way, strove to keep alive the tradition of dialectical critique of the existing order and radical intervention in the world to transform it. In Understanding Brecht we find collected together Benjamin’s most sensitive and probing writing on the dramatic and poetic work of his friend and tutor. Stimulated by Brecht’s oeuvre and theorising his particular dramatic techniques—such as the famous ‘estrangement effect’—Benjamin developed his own ideas about the role of art and the artist in crisis-ridden society. This volume contains Benjamin’s introductions to Brecht’s theory or epic theatre and close textual analyses of twelve poems by Brecht (printed in translation here) which exemplify Benjamin’s insistence that literary form and content are indivisible. Elsewhere Benjamin discusses the plays The Mother, Terror and Misery of the Third Reich, and The Threepenny Opera, digressing for some general remarks on Marx and satire. Here we also find Benjamin’s masterful essay “The Author as Producer” as well as an extract from his diaries that records the intense conversations held in the late 1930s in Denmark (Brecht’s place of exile) between the two most important cultural theorists of this century. In these discussions, the two men talked of subjects as diverse as the work of Franz Kafka, the unfolding Soviet Trials, and the problems of literary work on the edge of international war.
Download or read book Benjamin and Brecht written by Erdmut Wizisla and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating account of the friendship between two of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century Germany in the mid 1920s, a place and time of looming turmoil, brought together Walter Benjamin—acclaimed critic and extraordinary literary theorist—and Bertolt Brecht, one of the twentieth century’s most influential playwrights. It was a friendship that would shape their writing for the rest of their lives. In this groundbreaking work, Erdmut Wizisla explores what this relationship meant for them personally and professionally, as well as the effect it had on those around them. From the first meeting between Benjamin and Brecht to their experiences in exile, these eventful lives are illuminated by personal correspondence, journal entries and private miscellany—including previously unpublished materials—detailing the friends’ electric discussions of their collaboration. Wizisla delves into the archives of other luminaries in the distinguished constellation of writers and artists in Weimar Germany, which included Margarete Steffin, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch and Hannah Arendt. Wizisla’s account of this friendship opens a window on nearly two decades of European intellectual life.
Download or read book Aesthetics and Politics written by Theodor Adorno and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intense and lively debate on literature and art between thinkers who became some of the great figures of twentieth-century philosophy and literature. With an afterword by Fredric Jameson No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.
Download or read book Benjamin and Brecht written by Erdmut Wizisla and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Germany in the mid 1920s, a place and time of looming turmoil, brought together Walter Benjamin-acclaimed critic and extraordinary literary theorist-and Bertolt Brecht, one of the twentieth century's most influential playwrights. It was a friendship that would shape their writing for the rest of their lives. In this groundbreaking work, Erdmut Wizisla explores what this relationship meant for them personally and professionally, as well as the effect it had on those around them. From the first meeting between Benjamin and Brecht to their experiences in exile, these eventful lives are illuminated by personal correspondence, journal entries and private miscellany-including previously unpublished materials-detailing the friends' electric discussions of their collaboration. Wizisla delves into the archives of other luminaries in the distinguished constellation of writers and artists in Weimar Germany, which included Margarete Steffin, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch and Hannah Arendt. Wizisla's account of this friendship opens a window on nearly two decades of European intellectual life.
Download or read book Reflections written by Walter Benjamin and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht written by Erdmut Wizisla and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Erdmut Wizisla's groundbreaking work explores for the first time the important friendship between Walter Benjamin, the acclaimed critic and literary theorist, and Bertolt Brecht, one of the twentieth century's most influential theater artists, during the crucial interwar years in Berlin." "From the first meeting between Benjamin and Brecht and their roles in the ideological debate leading up to World War II, to their experiences in exile and Benjamin's reaction to Brecht's death, the events in this friendship are illuminated by the use of personal correspondence, journal entries, and notes - including previously unpublished materials- from the friends' electric discussions of shared projects. In addition to exploring correspondence between the two, Wizisla presents documents by colleagues who shaped and shaded their relationship, including Margaret Steffrin - Brecht's assistant and lover - Theodor Adorno, and Hannah Arendt." "Wizisla shows us the fascinating ideological exchanges between the two, with Benjamin espousing his ideas on historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism as a foil for Brecht's Marxist concept of art. Their differences foreshadowed the clash between Communism and Socialism in Weimar Germany that preceded the rise of the Nazi Fascism. Wizisla's examination of the friendship between Benjamin and Brecht, two artists at the height of their creative powers during a time of great political crisis, throws light on nearly two decades of European intellectual life." --Book Jacket.
Download or read book War Primer written by Bertolt Brecht and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A terrifying series of short poems by one of the world’s leading playwrights, set to images of World War II In this singular book written during World War Two, Bertolt Brecht presents a devastating visual and lyrical attack on war under modern capitalism. He takes photographs from newspapers and popular magazines, and adds short lapidary verses to each in a unique attempt to understand the truth of war using mass media. Pictures of catastrophic bombings, propaganda portraits of leading Nazis, scenes of unbearable tragedy on the battlefield — all these images contribute to an anthology of horror, from which Brecht’s perceptions are distilled in poems that are razor-sharp, angry and direct. The result is an outstanding literary memorial to World War Two and one of the most spontaneous, revealing and moving of Brecht’s works.
Download or read book The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910 1940 written by Walter Benjamin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-06-15 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These letters provide a lively view of Benjamin's life and thought from his days as a student to his melancholy experiences as an exile in Paris. As he defends his changing ideas to admiring and skeptical friends - poets, philosophers, and radicals - we witness the restless self-analysis of a creative mind far in advance of his own time.
Download or read book Selected Writings 1938 1940 written by Walter Benjamin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprising more than 65 pieces - journal articles, reviews, extended essays, sketches, aphorisms, and fragments - this volume shows the range of Walter Benjamin's writing. His topics here include poetry, fiction, drama, history, religion, love, violence, morality and mythology.
Download or read book Philosophers and Thespians written by Freddie Rokem and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the discursive practices of philosophy and theater/performance on the basis of actual encounters between representatives of these two fields.
Download or read book The Storyteller Essays written by Walter Benjamin and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new translation of philosopher Walter Benjamin's work as it pertains to his famous essay, "The Storyteller," this collection includes short stories, book reviews, parables, and as a selection of writings by other authors who had an influence on Benjamin's work. “The Storyteller” is one of Walter Benjamin’s most important essays, a beautiful and suggestive meditation on the relation between narrative form, social life, and individual existence—and the product of at least a decade’s work. What might be called the story of The Storyteller Essays starts in 1926, with a piece Benjamin wrote about the German romantic Johann Peter Hebel. It continues in a series of short essays, book reviews, short stories, parables, and even radio shows for children. This collection brings them all together to give readers a new appreciation of how Benjamin’s thinking changed and ripened over time, while including several key readings of his own—texts by his contemporaries Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács; by Paul Valéry; and by Herodotus and Montaigne. Finally, to bring things around, there are three short stories by “the incomparable Hebel” with whom the whole intellectual adventure began.
Download or read book Walter Benjamin written by Bernd Witte and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Expanded and revised, as well as translated, from the 1985 German edition, details the thought of Benjamin (1892-1940), an all-around European intellectual most active between the wars. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Bertolt Brecht A Literary Life written by Stephen Parker and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-02-13 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first English language biography of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) in two decades paints a strikingly new picture of one of the twentieth century's most controversial cultural icons. Drawing on letters, diaries and unpublished material, including Brecht's medical records, Parker offers a rich and enthralling account of Brecht's life and work, viewed through the prism of the artist. Tracing his extraordinary life, from his formative years in Augsburg, through the First World War, his politicisation during the Weimar Republic and his years of exile, up to the Berliner Ensemble's dazzling productions in Paris and London, Parker shows how Brecht achieved his transformative effect upon world theatre and poetry. Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life is a powerful portrait of a great, compulsively contradictory personality, whose artistry left its lasting imprint on modern culture.
Download or read book Men in Dark Times written by Hannah Arendt and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1968 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collection of essays which present portraits of individuals ranging from Rosa Luxemburg to Pope John XXIII who the author believes have illuminated "dark times."
Download or read book Walter Benjamin written by Terry Eagleton and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2024-11-26 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From our finest radical literary analyst, a classic study of the great philosopher and cultural theorist.
Download or read book Illuminations written by Walter Benjamin and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-11-05 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illuminations contains the most celebrated work of Walter Benjamin, one of the most original and influential thinkers of the 20th Century: 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', ‘The Task of the Translator’ and 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', as well as essays on Kafka, storytelling, Baudelaire, Brecht's epic theatre, Proust and an anatomy of his own obsession, book collecting. This now legendary volume offers the best possible access to Benjamin’s singular and significant achievement, while Hannah Arendt’s introduction reveals how his life and work are a prism to his times.
Download or read book Charles Baudelaire written by Walter Benjamin and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2023-08-22 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic account of late nineteenth-century Paris and a study of Baudelaire's life and work Walter Benjamin, one of the foremost cultural commentators and theorists of this century, is perhaps best known for his analyses of the work of art in the modern age and the philosophy of history. Yet it was through his study of the social and cultural history of the late nineteenth-century Paris, examined particularly in relation to the figure of the great Parisian lyric poet Charles Baudelaire, that Benjamin tested and enriched some of his core concepts and themes. Contained within these pages are, amongst other insights, his notion of the flaneur, his theory of memory and remembrance, his assessment of the utopian Fourier and his reading of the modernist movement.
