By Jane O. Newman
In Benjamin's Library, Jane O. Newman bargains, for the 1st time in any language, a examining of Walter Benjamin's notoriously opaque paintings, beginning of the German Tragic Drama that systematically attends to its position in discussions of the Baroque in Benjamin's day. bearing in mind the literary and cultural contexts of Benjamin's paintings, Newman recovers Benjamin’s courting to the ideologically loaded readings of the literature and political idea of the seventeenth-century Baroque that abounded in Germany throughout the political and financial crises of the Weimar years.
To date, the importance of the Baroque for foundation of the German Tragic Drama has been glossed over through scholars of Benjamin, so much of whom have neither learn it during this context nor engaged with the customarily incongruous debates concerning the interval that stuffed either educational and well known texts within the years major as much as and following global struggle I. Armed with awesome old, bibliographical, philological, and orthographic examine, Newman indicates the level to which Benjamin participated in those debates via reconstructing the literal and figurative heritage of 16th- and seventeenth-century books that Benjamin analyzes and the literary, artwork old and paintings theoretical, and political theological discussions of the Baroque with which he was once prevalent. In so doing, she demanding situations the exceptionalist, even hagiographic, ways that experience turn into universal in Benjamin reviews. the result's a deeply discovered ebook that might infuse much-needed existence into the learn of 1 of the main influential thinkers of the 20th century.
"Jane O. Newman's erudite and eye-opening Benjamin’s Library bores into the Trauerspiel e-book with enough unbending get to the bottom of to disencumber an figuring out of its availability as a uniquely worthwhile crux within the self-understanding of literary-historical experiences as a complete. Newman skillfully lines the citational internet of literary students and paintings historians jostling for cognizance in Benjamin’s account of the baroque, highlighting the untold tale of that period’s pivotal significance within the conceptualization of modernity within the past due 19th and early 20th centuries. fairly impressive is her acceptance case research of precisely the one publication Newman treats might produce this kind of large and built-in trend of implications. This operating version of the method of disciplinary self-reflection might be famous as itself a milestone in that process."—Citation from the 2012 Committee of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for experiences in Germanic Languages and Literatures (Modern Language Association)
"Newman's research deals an astonishingly thorough reconstruction of the Trauerspiel book’s permitting highbrow stipulations, paying detailed recognition to the debates in artwork historical past, literary background, and theology because the 19th century and round international warfare I. . . . Newman’s provocative learn bargains a picture of Benjamin that runs counter to the permitted model of the author because the quintessentially cosmopolitan, border-crossing highbrow . . . [and] units information criteria for a go back to archival study, ancient reconstruction, and philological rigor in Benjamin studies."—Rolf J. Goebel, Monatshefte (Spring 2013)
