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“... of life and death; and when they defer to or expatiate upon European theorists of translation like Walter Benjamin or George Steiner, it is easy to miss, as I think Christopher Reid did, the altogether un-European urgency of their concern. For them, translation, and the disputable possibility of it (at least as regards verse), is a matter neither academic ...”

“... time that flows uninterrupted on and on, as in that magnificent passage from Hebel which Walter Benjamin so admired:In the meantime the city of Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake, and the Seven Years’ War came and went, and Emperor Francis I died, and the Jesuit Order was abolished, and Poland was partitioned, and Empress Maria-Theresa ...”

“... epiphany. He’d been reading ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ by Walter Benjamin and every Saturday morning, when entrance was free, visiting the city’s Museum of Fine Arts: One Saturday, I went to see a show of a German photographer whom I thought I had never heard of before. It was the first American retrospective of ...”

“... we should think of climate change as an updated version of the chess-playing Turkish puppet that Walter Benjamin likened to historical materialism operated by the hidden hand of theology, save that historical materialism has now become the wizened hunchback that controls the puppet and has to keep out of sight. That would be too simplistic. The ...”

“... recur throughout A la recherche), engages the nature of his prose as well as his sentiments; as Walter Benjamin said, in one of the finest essays ever written on the novel, Proust’s language is inseparable from his ‘intransigent French spirit’. It is a language with roots reaching deep into the history of French prose from Montaigne through ...”

“... because failed, or thwarted, or unproductive, or fragmentary in literary remains – Barthes, Benjamin, Artaud, Pavese, Canetti, Leiris, Walser, Cioran. Sontag wouldn’t even utter the names of many of those she had as forefathers. Kant was the grandee of the aesthetic of sexless distance she so resented. Yet his name almost never comes up in her early ...”

“... is perceived as a new degree of uncontrollable violence and a new realm of impunity.Both Yeats and Walter Benjamin invoke the story of Niobe in this context. Niobe was the queen of Thebes who boasted of having so many children, and in particular of having more children than the goddess Leto. Leto had only two children. They were both gods – Apollo and ...”

“... of the musical work of the past, its intimate unity with the time and place of performance, what Walter Benjamin called its aura, has been destroyed. Music has become literally disembodied.’ But as Chanan points out elsewhere in Repeated Takes, when Benjamin spoke of aura he was referring to visual art and the ...”

“... the television lights were nine elderly men, all into their seventies or beyond. Their names were Walter Brudno, Smith Brookhart, Nick Doman, Benjamin Ferencz, Whitney Harris, Charles Horsky, Henry King, Daniel Margolies and Walter Rockler, and they had all been prosecuting lawyers at the ...”

“... the early 1900s had come to regard the 19th-century promise of inevitable progress as empty or, as Walter Benjamin saw it, catastrophic. Facing total war, they insisted that action was essential to forestall disaster. As Marx and Engels had warned in the Communist Manifesto, the fight between the oppressor and the oppressed would end ‘either in a ...”

“... an instance of that blending of motivelessness and deliberateness, of control and abdication, that Walter Benjamin appreciated in Walser; he seems, by turns and putting it very bluntly, too stupid to be cynical and too cynical to be stupid. A sort of repro aesthetic (‘Walser paints a postcard world,’ Gass says) seems as likely to serve a ...”

“... statues and legacies. The maps of cities carry, almost unconsciously, an account of the past, as Walter Benjamin said, and he has numerous progeny now in his quest for unearthing the layers of meaning in the streets: Rebecca Solnit has compiled atlases that are albums cum maps of personal experiences in San Francisco, New Orleans and New York. Literary ...”

“... gaze”’. Significantly, he undoes any binary of distraction and attention, departing from Walter Benjamin and many others on this score. For Crary, there is always an uneasy relay between the two states, with new demands for attention prompted by new forms of distraction and vice versa.Manet, Seurat and Cézanne are useful to Crary because they ...”

“... Alexandria has been in the ascendant. Warburg is now regarded, alongside Freud and Walter Benjamin, as part of a pantheon of Jewish thinkers interested in the irrational underpinnings of modernity. ‘Warburg is our haunting,’ the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman wrote in 2004. ‘He is to art history that which an unredeemed ghost ...”

“... marshes in which the malarial mosquitoes breed. For many years I have treasured a quotation from Walter Benjamin which may have helped spawn the character of Arnow or, more likely, contributed something further to a figure already compounded of many memories and unconscious sources: ‘The slightest carelessness in the digging of a ditch or the ...”