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“... not then know how much he had learnt from Marxist critics like Frederick Antal, Ernst Fischer and Walter Benjamin, but it was clear that for Berger the difficulties of a painter of our time involved more than lack of technique or talent. It was a matter of how art meshed with the other cogs in the machine of history. Picasso could be a genius without ...”

“... Heinrich and Golo Mann, Hannah Arendt, Anna Seghers, Simone Weil, Arthur Koestler, Victor Serge, Walter Benjamin, Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Mahler, Lion Feuchtwanger, Konrad Heiden (Hitler’s first truthful biographer), Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Moïse Kisling, the young Claude Lévi-Strauss … A band of surrealists led by Max Ernst ...”

“... history painting and photographic effects – make sense. Across the Atlantic in these same years, Walter Benjamin argued that mass society and mass media worked to erode the auratic basis of traditional art. Rivera wanted it both ways – technological advance in society and iconic authority in art – and sometimes he forced the issue. For example, he ...”

“... the clip is a unit of communication in itself, like a gag or an anecdote or a bit of graffiti. Walter Benjamin imagined an ideal book consisting of nothing but quotes. A conversation made up entirely of quotes was always more likely, but the internet has made possible for everyone a feat that previously could have been managed only by two people with ...”

“... ultimately mysterious and ambiguous texture of Kafka’s art. Chief among these were the voices of Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Marthe Robert and Erich Heller. Heller’s essay on The Castle in The Disinherited Mind (1952) marked a real turning point. He argued persuasively that it was folly to go on debating whether Kafka was religious or ...”

“... Baudelaire now stands, Janus-faced, on the threshold of so many discussions of modernity. It was Walter Benjamin who most persuasively argued that Baudelaire was the first ‘writer of modern life’, adapting the title of Baudelaire’s encomium on the artist Constantin Guys, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, published in 1863. The influence of ...”

“... schemes of explanation. Bernstein preserves a clear-cut distinction here, following Lukacs (and Walter Benjamin) in locating the era of natural, authentic narrative firmly in the pre-novelistic past. It is the modern, alienated consciousness – under conditions fixed by capitalist society – that works such a change as to demand theoretical ...”

“... The result is a transformed view of the social whole, which Adorno developed with his friend Walter Benjamin. Benjamin, with his astonishing blend of Marxism, surrealism, Kabbala, Messianic theology and avant-garde aesthetics, belonged to the fertile Judeo-Marxist current which produced Horkheimer and Adorno. But ...”

“... Walter Benjamin once remarked that what drove men and women to revolt was not dreams of liberated grandchildren but memories of oppressed ancestors. Visions of future happiness are all very well; but happiness is a feeble, holiday-camp kind of word, resonant of manic grins and multicoloured jackets, not least when compared with the kind of past which, as Marx commented, weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living ...”

“... in the process. Imagine Proust, propped up in bed, rambling about his writing life, crossed with Benjamin, in his last days at the Bibliothèque Nationale, rearranging his Arcades notes, and add a little of the ‘I can’t go on, I go on’ of Beckett and a lot of the run-on ranting of Thomas Bernhard, a contemporary whom the Gaddis surrogate here accuses ...”

“... word beneath the original. This third approach to translation was most forcefully articulated by Walter Benjamin, who argued, using Hölderlin’s work as an example, for a two-way process of translation, not between translation and reader but between the two languages. According to Benjamin, translations should ...”

“... his next book. Genette puts us in mind of the traditional seriousness of the essay form, which, as Walter Benjamin recalls in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, was a major vehicle of philosophical investigation before the system-builders of the 19th century repudiated it. Yet it is not Benjamin who springs to mind as ...”

“... is, the dogged persistence of distinctive attributes of labouring and suffering over generations. Walter Benjamin once remarked that the memory of oppressed ancestors is more catalytic of rebellion than any dream of liberated descendants; Kollwitz seems to agree. However, iconic images aren’t necessarily simplistic ones. Sometimes her signature motifs ...”

“... une passante’, gives us some sense of this, with its dramatic image (brilliantly explicated by Walter Benjamin) of the body twitching in spasm, close to nervous breakdown (‘crispé comme un extravagant’). The greatest danger of risk-taking was psychic depletion, and Baudelaire’s gambler (in the poem, ‘Le Jeu’, for instance) more often than ...”

“... collapse these camps became ‘mousetraps’ from which escape was both necessary and difficult: Walter Benjamin, Ernst Weiss and Walter Hasenclever all committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of the Gestapo. Those who crossed the Atlantic rarely found their lives endangered, but they still faced ...”