Reading Magic in Walter Benjamin

This chapter focuses on divination in Walter Benjamin’s work, against the background of modernism’s self-imposed rejection of futurity and engagement with ‘primal history’, and the rise of fascism, commodity culture, and “Lebensphilosophie” or vitalism. It explores his writings on fate, graphology, gambling, childhood, language theory, his doctrine of the similar and the mimetic faculty, foregrounding his Neoplatonist investments, interests in magic, and take on the nineteenth century. Overall, the chapter considers the relations between Benjamin’s model of reading, especially magic reading, and the idea of happiness or “Glück.”

Painting Magic in Keller’s Green Henry

This chapter offers an exemplary reading of Gottfried Keller’s Bildungsroman, Der Grüne Heinrich, in terms of Stimmung. A synopsis of recent theoretical discussions of Stimmung is coupled with an exploration of its affinities with classical “sympatheia” and hence with sympathetic magic and its alternate causalities and potential futural effects. Focusing on themes of landscape painting, erotic attraction, witchery, and relations between the human and nonhuman worlds, the following analysis of Keller’s novel develops a new account of realist things, representations, and temporalities, based on a model of realism as grounded in divinatory readings both in and of the literary text.