27. Inventory of a Century: On Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (2013)

2019 ◽  
pp. 462-483
Keyword(s):  
Arcades Project

Virtual Embodiment as/and the Threshold of Love

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Harris
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
State Building ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Empire State Building ◽  
Arcades Project ◽  
Performance Texts ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Stranger

This essay draws upon the author’s performance script Fall and Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project as a provocation for considering the ways performance texts provide a threshold for somatic inquiry, and for recognizing the limits of scholarly analysis that does not take up performance-as-inquiry. Set at the Empire State Building, this essay embodies the connections and missed possibilities between strangers and intimates in the context of urban modern life. Fall’s protagonist is positioned within a landscape of capitalist exchange, but defies this matrix to offer instead a gift at the threshold of life/death, virtual/real, and love/loss. Through somatic inquiry and witnessing as threshold experiences, the protagonist (as Benjamin’s flaneur) moves through urban space and time, proving that both scholarship and performance remain irrevocably embodied, and as such invariably tethered to the visceral, the stranger, risk, and death.

Historical Citation and Revolutionary Epistemology

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-283
Author(s):  
Alison Ross
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Multiple Points ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Past ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Arcades Project ◽  
Intended Effect

This article defends the thesis that there are multiple points of exchange between the categories of “word” and “image” in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Benjamin describes the truth of the articulate wish of the past as “graphically perceptible” and the image as “readable.” In this respect the vocabulary of “word” and “image” that Benjamin’s early work had opposed are not just deployed in concert, but specific features of the vocabulary of “word” and “image” become exchangeable. The distinctive features of this exchange can be used to expound on Benjamin’s peculiar understanding of revolutionary experience and the significance of the break that it marks with his early way of opposing the word and the image. In particular, the exchange of features between word and image can explain the mechanics and intended effect of his idea that the meaning of history can be perceived in an image. The study of this exchange also shows that although the framework of “graphic perception” entails an experience of motivating meaning that is epistemologically grounded, the citation model of history is unable to secure the extension of the sought after legibility of the nineteenth century to a recipient.

Reviews: History and the Media, Writing Biography: Historians and Their Craft, Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with ‘The Arcades Project’, Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books, Shakespeare's Culture in Modern Performance, Shakespeare's Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage, Secret Shakespeare, Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play, the Bible in English: Its History and Influence, John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, William Blake's Comic Vision, Rural Englands: Labouring Lives in the Nineteenth Century, Victorian Shakespeare, 2 Vols, Vol. 1, Theatre, Drama and Performance; Vol. 2, Literature and Culture, Consumerism and American Girls' Literature, 1860–1940, Twentieth-Century Writing and the British Working Class, Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Modernist Literature, Postcolonial Animal Tale from Kipling to Coetzee, Shakespeare and the American NationCannadineDavid (ed.), History and the Media , Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. vii + 175, £19.99.AmbrosiusLloyd E. (ed.), Writing Biography: Historians and their craft , University of Nebraska Press, 2004, pp. xiii + 166, £34.50.BenjaminWalter, Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940 , trans. JephcottEdmund, ed. EilandHoward and JenningsMichael W., Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. vi + 477, £26.50McLaughlinKevin and RosenPhilip (eds), Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with ‘The Arcades Project‘ , Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 219, £10.50.KnappJames A., Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books , Ashgate Publishing, 2003, pp. xvi + 274, £35.JonesMaria, Shakespeare's Culture in Modern Performance , Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. xii + 213, £45.Goy-BlanquetDominque, Shakespeare's Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage , Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. viii + 312, £63.WilsonRichard, Secret Shakespeare , Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. viii + 26, £15.99 pbDuttonRichard, FindlayAlison and WilsonRichard (eds), Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare , Manchester University Press, 2003, pp. xii + 267, £16.99 pb.CavanaghDermot, Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play , Early Modern Literature in History, Palgrave, 2003, pp. x + 197, £45.DaniellDavid, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence , Yale University Press, 2003, pp. xx + 900. £29.95.BarbourReid, John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England , University of Toronto Press, 2003, pp. x + 417, £42.MakdisiSaree, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s , University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. xviii + 394, $22 pbRawlinsonNick, William Blake's Comic Vision , Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. xiv + 292, £42.50.ReayBarry, Rural Englands: Labouring Lives in the Nineteenth Century , Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 25 illustrations, 7 figs., pp. x + 274, £16.99 pb.MarshallGail and PooleAdrian (eds), Victorian Shakespeare , 2 vols, Vol. 1, Theatre, Drama and Performance; Vol. 2, Literature and Culture , Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. xv + 213 and pp. xiv + 228, £90.StoneleyPeter, Consumerism and American Girls' Literature, 1860–1940 , Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. x +167, £40.KirkJohn, Twentieth-Century Writing and the British Working Class , University of Wales Press, 2003, pp. 224, £35.ValentineKylie, Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Modernist Literature , Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 224, £45.NymanJopi, Postcolonial Animal Tale from Kipling to Coetzee , New Delhi, Atlantic Publishers and Distributor, 2003, pp. vi + 176, Rupees 375.00SturgessKim C., Shakespeare and the American Nation , Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. x + 234, £45.

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-96
Author(s):  
R.C. Richardson ◽  
David Watson ◽  
Gary Farnell ◽  
John N. King ◽  
M. J. Jardine ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
William Blake ◽  
History Plays ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Arcades Project ◽  
The Media ◽  
John Selden ◽  
And Performance ◽  
History Play

Capitalism and Primal History in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project

differences ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 123-143
Author(s):  
D. L. Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Arcades Project

scholarly journals Afterimages of Steel

2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 264-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Swanton
Keyword(s):  
Steel Industry ◽  
Arcades Project

This essay works with afterimages of the steel industry to explore the material legacies and many afterlives of industrial remains in Dortmund. Inspired both by Walter Benjamin’s writings on the afterimages of capitalist modernity in the Arcades Project, and by the afterimages of steel produced by Haiko Hebig, the article gathers fragmented encounters in an account that evokes the materiality, textures, co-habitations, and memories of Dortmund’s postindustrial landscape.

The Flaneur in the Parlor: Poe's “Philosophy of Furniture”

Prospects ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 103-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin J. Hayes
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Arcades Project ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The City

In one of the brief reflections Walter Benjamin composed as part of his Arcades Project, he personified the mid-19th-century domestic interior and made it and the flaneur onfidantes: “The space winks at the flaneur: What do you think may have gone on here?” (418–19). Benjamin typically filtered much of his thought through the figure of the flaneur, a recognizable urban type that emerged during the middle third of the 19th century, one who deliberately strolled the city streets and arcades and attempted to discern the meanings of what he observed. In the fullest scholarly treatment of the subject, Anke Gleber argued that the act of walking formed an essential part of the flaneur's observational process. Discussing such works as E. T. A. Hoffman's “The Cousin's Corner-Window,” however, Gleber did acknowledge a “paradoxical variant,” the stationary flaneur (13).

The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

1991 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 691
Author(s):  
O.K. Werckmeister ◽  
Susan Buck-Morss
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Arcades Project
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document