false http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174426677m/398096.jpg 398096 2 In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the prismlike radiance created by the association of three modern masters, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. The volume pinpoints the intersections of these divergent witnesses to the modern condition of doubt, the no-man's-land between traditional religion and modern secular culture. Scholem, the devoted Zionist and master historian of Jewish mysticism, and Benjamin, the Marxist cultural critic, dedicated much of their thought and correspondence to Kafka, the explorer in fiction of radical alienation. Kafka's sense of spiritual complexities was an inspiration to both thinkers in their resistance to the murderous simplification of totalitarian ideology. In <i>Necessary Angels</i> Alter uncovers a moment when the future of modernism is revealed in its preoccupation with the past. The angel of the title is first Kafka's: on June 25, 1914, the writer recorded in his diary a dream vision of an angel that turned into the painted wooden figurehead of a ship. In 1940, at the end of his life, Walter Benjamin devoted the ninth of his <i>Theses on the Philosophy of History</i> to a meditation on an angel by the artist Paul Klee, first quoting a poem he had written on that painting. In Benjamin's vision, the figure from Klee becomes an angel of history, sucked into the future by the storm of progress, his face looking back to Eden. Benjamin bequeathed the Klee oil painting to Scholem; it hung in the living room of Scholem's home on Abarbanel Street in Jerusalem until 1989, when his widow placed it in the Israel Museum. Alter's focus on the epiphanic force of memory on these three great modernists shows with sometimes startling, sometimes prophetic clarity that a complete break with tradition is not essential to modernism. <i>Necessary Angels</i> itself continues the necessary discovery of the future in the past. 387554 1 3 1991 Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem total:5|5:3|4:2| 5 23 8 0 0 0 false false Sat Oct 03 21:45:17 -0700 2009 Sat Oct 03 21:45:17 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Mon Jan 05 12:59:09 -0800 2009 Mon Jan 05 12:59:09 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Mon Sep 08 23:28:54 -0700 2008 Mon Sep 08 23:28:54 -0700 2008 4 0 false false Mon Aug 11 09:36:16 -0700 2008 Mon Aug 11 09:36:16 -0700 2008 0 0 false false Wed Feb 20 15:28:22 -0800 2008 Wed Feb 20 15:28:27 -0800 2008 5 0 false false Tue Feb 05 18:40:08 -0800 2008 Tue Feb 05 18:40:08 -0800 2008 5 0 false false Sat Mar 31 09:56:44 -0700 2007 Sat Mar 31 09:56:44 -0700 2007 5 0 false false Mon Mar 26 10:04:19 -0700 2007 Mon Mar 26 10:04:19 -0700 2007 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=398096