Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism

by Michael W. Jennings

In Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism, Michael Jennings convincingly asserts the continuities between Benjamin's early, metaphysical, and his later, materialist, writings. Although his study is less original than he suggests, it is conducted on a unusally large scale. Jennings' work is in the fullest sense of the word a general reading of Benjamin. At its center is Benjamin's attack on historcism and its addiction to the myth of progress. Highly sceptial of the notion that history can be narrated, Benjamin reproaches historicists for presenting the past as an objective totality within the ideology of the ruling class. It is central to the maintencance of power by the bourgeoise. Benjamin discovers a same complicity with the oppressor in symbolic or auratic works of art, which puport to be organically whole and close, and are sanctioned by inclusion in a time-tested canon.

From a review by Leblans Anne.

233 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1987