Forrest’s Reviews > Illuminations: Essays and Reflections > Status Update

Benjamin's analysis and critique of film in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is not so interesting when addressing the work itself as it is fascinating when one looks at the audience and the change it engenders in them vis-a-vis their appreciation of static art.

After reading this, I definitely need to read Flowers of Evil yet again. In fact, I should make that a regular practice. I can't stand French as a language (everything is an exception, sorry, but give me German and Latin rules all day long), but if I were ever to attempt to learn it again, it would be for this sole purpose: Reading Baudelaire.

I find Benjamin's Marxist analysis of Baudelaire much more convincing than his Freudian analysis of the poet.

The Freudian analysis of Proust and Baudelaire feel flimsy, at best. I get the analysis of memory, but the Freudian dream-connection just hangs by a weak thread.

Sadly, I know very little about Brecht's work, though I know something about the man himself. I had a professor in college who was a Brecht expert. I don't have space here, but I'll try to remember his Brecht as Communist/Nazi in my review. It's a pretty funny story.

Absolutely one of the best summations of the spirit of Kafka's work.

As much as I love Kafka, it's apparent that I need to read more of him. I guess The Collected Stories (all of his short stories) and The Trial aren't quite enough. I feel like such a poser . . . Maybe I should read him in German to feed my ego a little.

In his essay "The Storyteller," Benjamin parses out the different characteristics, not of structure, but of the worldview of storytelling (as in: around a campfire), the short story, and the novel. He reflects on collective vs individual memory, the impatience of modernity (don't get me started), and how the absence of death and the view of eternity it provides has shaped fiction, in general.