Walter Benjamin
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most celebrated thinkers of the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, critic, historian, an investigator of culture, a maker of radio programmes and more. Notably, in his Arcades Project, he looked into the past of Paris to understand the modern age and, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, examined how the new media of film and photography enabled art to be politicised, and politics to become a form of art. The rise of the Nazis in Germany forced him into exile, and he worked in Paris in dread of what was to come; when his escape from France in 1940 was blocked at the Spanish border, he took his own life.
Guests
- Esther Leslie
2 episodes
Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London -
Kevin McLaughlin No other episodes
Dean of the Faculty and Professor of English, Comparative Literature and German Studies at Brown University -
Carolin Duttlinger No other episodes
Professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford
Reading list
-
Aesthetics and Politics
T.W. Adorno et al. (Verso, 2020) Google Books → -
The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness
Walter Benjamin (Verso, 2016) Google Books → -
The Arcades Project
Walter Benjamin (trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin) (Harvard University Press, 1999) Google Books → -
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Walter Benjamin (trans. Harry Zohn) (Schocken, 2007) Google Books → -
Radio Benjamin
Walter Benjamin (ed. Lecia Rosenthal) (Verso, 2014) Google Books → -
One-Way Street and Other Writings
Walter Benjamin (Penguin, 2009) Google Books → -
Walter Benjamin: The Aura of Photography
Carolin Duttlinger (_Poetics Today_, 29, 2008) -
Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard University Press, 2016) Google Books → -
Time of the Magicians: The Invention of Modern Thought, 1919-29
Wolfram Eilenberger (trans. Shaun Whiteside) (Penguin, 2021) Google Books → -
The Cambridge Introduction to Walter Benjamin
David S. Ferris (Cambridge University Press, 2008) Google Books → -
Walter Benjamin - Critical Lives
Esther Leslie (Reaktion, 2007) Google Books → -
Walter Benjamin's Archive: Images, Texts, Signs
Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, Erdmut Wizisla (Verso, 2015)
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Programme ID: m0014710
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0014710
Auto-category: 193 (German and Austrian philosophy)