Benjamin

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (15 July 1892—27 September 1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also influenced by the writings of his younger contemporaries Bertolt Brecht, who developed critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism, and Gershom Scholem, who founded modern, academic study of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. Over the last few decades, regard for his work has risen dramatically, making him one of the most important twentieth century thinkers about literature and about modern aesthetic experience. As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas drawn from historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was a novel contribution to western philosophy, Marxism, and aesthetic theory. As a literary scholar, he translated the Tableaux Parisiens edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal as well as Proust's In Search of Lost Time. His work is widely cited in academic and literary studies, in particular his essays The Task of the Translator and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Influenced by Bachofen, Benjamin gave the name "auratic perception" to the aesthetic faculty through which civilization would recover a lost appreciation of myth. Among Benjamin's most important works were the following: * Zur Kritik der Gewalt (Critique of Violence / 1921). * Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (Goethe's Elective Affinities / 1922). * Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama [Mourning Play] / 1928). * Einbahnstraße (One Way Street / 1928). * Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter Seiner Technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction / 1936). * Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood around 1900 / 1950, published posthumously). * Über den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept of History / Theses on the Philosophy of History) / 1939, published posthumously). * Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire / 1938).