Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with The Arcades Project

by Kevin McLaughlin, Philip Rosen

The Arcades Project is the unfinished, final work of influential cultural theorist, critic, and historian Walter Benjamin. Until 1999, this huge, unruly manuscript, which provides a more complete picture of the diversity of Benjamin’s work than formerly available, had not been fully translated into English. Benjamin Now is the first collection of essays in English to focus on The Arcades Project.While this essential text’s title refers to its ostensible subject—the nineteenth-century shopping arcades of Paris—The Arcades Project is a mass of cultural, political, and social material presented in the form of a vast montage. Benjamin Now reconsiders the significance of his theories and writings in light of this final project. The contributors gathered in this special issue—several of whom participated in the translation of The Arcades Project—include leading scholars from modern culture and media studies, comparative literature and literary studies, art history, philosophy, cultural studies, and film studies.

Contributors. T. J. Clark, Howard Eiland, Peter Fenves, Tom Gunning, Michael Jennings, Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Kevin McLaughlin, Philip Rosen, Henry Sussman, Lindsay Waters, Samuel Weber, Peter Wollen

228 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2003

About the author

Kevin McLaughlin is Dean of the Faculty and George Hazard Crooker Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and German Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Literature (1995) and Paperwork: Literature and Mass Mediacy in an Age of Paper (2005), as well as co-translator into English of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project.