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The Marvels of Walter Benjamin

The Marvels of Walter Benjamin J.M. Coetzee January 11, 2001 issue Reviewed: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926 Edmund Jephcott, Harry Zohn, and others. by Walter Benjamin, edited by Marcus Bullock, edited by Michael W. Jennings. Translated from the German by Rodney Livingstone, Stanley Corngold, Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 520 pp., $37.50 Selected Writings,Volume 2: 1927-1934 by Walter Benjamin, edited by Michael W. Jennings, edited by Howard Eiland, edited by Gary Smith. Translated from the German by Rodney Livingstone and others. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 870 pp., $37.50 The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, Translated from the German and French by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1,073 pp., $39.95 1. The story is by now so well known that it barely needs to be retold. The setting is the Franco-Spanish border, the time 1940. Walter Benjamin, fleeing occupied France, presents himself to the wife of a certain Fi...
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Second Dream

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  The Paris Review www.theparisreview.org “Second Dream,” C. S. Giscombe Yahoo / Inbox Paris Review Poetry   www.theparisreview.org From: newsletter@theparisreview.org Unsubscribe To: quocoai_sontay@yahoo.com Sat, May 23 at 8:15 AM View this email in your browser C. S. Giscombe Second Dream I was a woman in a prison camp, my job was to work in the yard. I walked away, drifted north, like I do, and came to Canada; but by then I was a man dressed in a long Soviet coat, wool with a red collar. Better I would have retreated to the mountains, I thought, or the interior. Why not just go on into Canada? someone said. It was how the border had appeared so quickly when my experience was that the roads that were the way over were always further north than I had figured when I’d set out. In my experience—waking life—nothing had readied me for such an arrival. Walking north, I was surely out of bounds, a city woman, then a man indistinguishable from his own prowess. You know how I figure...
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The Last Intellectual

  The Last Intellectual Susan Sontag October 12, 1978 issue Reviewed: Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings by Walter Benjamin, edited by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund Jephcott Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 348 pp., $12.95 In most of the portrait photographs he is looking down, his right hand to his face. The earliest one I know shows him in 1927—he is thirty-five—with dark curly hair over a high forehead, mustache above a full lower lip: youthful, almost handsome. With his head lowered, his jacketed shoulders seem to start behind his ears; his thumb leans against his jaw; the rest of the hand, cigarette between bent index and third fingers, covers his chin; the downward look through his glasses—the soft, day-dreamer’s gaze of the myopic—seems to float off to the lower left of the photograph. In the picture from the late 1930s on the cover of Reflections , a new selection in English of Walter Benjamin’s writings, the curly hair has hardly receded, but there is...
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