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“... a striking uncertainty about Moscow urbanism, a looseness in its grip on the landscape, something Walter Benjamin, who was in Moscow from December 1926 to February 1927, observed with perceptive perplexity:In the streets of Moscow there is a curious state of affairs: the Russian village is playing hide-and-seek in them. If you step through one of the ...”

“... it in his March on Rome in 1922. This is one lesson of futurism, and it was articulated as such by Walter Benjamin at the end of his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility’ (1936): with Marinetti and company, Benjamin writes, ‘self-alienation has reached such a degree’ that mankind ‘can ...”

“... Fredric​ Jameson points out in this study that Walter Benjamin never wrote a book, or not of a traditional kind. His account of German baroque theatre, translated into English as The Origin of German Tragic Drama, was written in the early 1920s as an academic thesis, though it was later published as a book ...”

“... every moment ushers in some fleeting future which will be instantly superseded, rather as for Walter Benjamin even the most perishable of historical moments is the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter. If classicism, which slows time down, undermines the importance of the contemporary, the same might be said of Modernism, which speeds ...”

“... case, as Gabriel Josipovici pre-emptively asserts in his introduction, that Blanchot ‘is, with Walter Benjamin, the finest literary critic of the century’, then we have been grievously remiss in leaving him for so long untranslated. For Blanchot isn’t new: he is in his mid-seventies, he has been writing criticism for forty years, he has published ...”

“... Bewußtsein (1992). The visionary magic that entranced Stefan George’s circle was denounced by Walter Benjamin and exploited by the Nazis for propaganda purposes. Hölderlin’s mental problems have attracted considerable attention in France, from Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytical probings to Foucault’s refusal to reduce his alienation to a ...”

“... bafflement rather than existential angst. I don’t mean the films are shallow or shifting – as Walter Benjamin said, a depiction of confusion is not the same as a confused depiction – but the characters are constantly surprised by the ordinary, and the concept of depth seems new on them. Trier has spoken about presenting a world of ‘failed ...”

“... because American commerce Jews want profit?’ That same year in Berlin, Esther Leslie reports, Walter Benjamin was also thinking about Mickey mania. After talking to some friends, including Kurt Weill, Benjamin made a few notes in praise of this insolent, lowlife, magically animated creature. Mickey’s cartoons ...”

“... it really was’. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940) I am finding it​ very hard to write a Chaucer biography. Commissioned an uncomfortably long time ago, I have delayed and fussed, despaired and dithered, and rewritten the first half several ...”

“... immigrants, who had raised him alone in Cleveland, Ohio, before marrying her second husband, Walter Kitaj. In the drawing, Brooks lifts her head from the letter she is reading, her attention caught by something beyond the frame. Her earring echoes the dowelling pivot of the deckchair – a neat pictorial device – but our attention lingers on the odd ...”

“... both English and American criticism altogether, and to return to Schlegel’s homeland and to Walter Benjamin. The heart of the book lies not in the chapter about Benjamin, however, but in the programmatic chapter called ‘Literary Commentary as Literature’, in which in a handful of brilliant pages Hartman links ...”

“... New York as part of the post-modernist experience.’One can’t help reflecting that when Walter Benjamin first diagnosed the effects of mechanical reproduction sixty years ago, it was to welcome it as a liberation. Works of art were being released from their aura, their unique place in space and time, their roots in the past, their ties to ...”

“... Is culture merely a sublimation of barbarism? Is it an authentic source of value even if (as Walter Benjamin considered) its roots were to be found in wretchedness and exploitation, or do its cloistered refinements fatally weaken our sensitivity to more mundane matters, insulating us from common or garden compassion even as they intensify our ...”

“... had its dark aspect, but suggests that in the modern era we have also become addicted to what Walter Benjamin called ‘that most terrible drug – ourselves – which we take in ...”

“... earlier, more self-confident polyglottist, Ezra Pound. Perloff finds a precursor for all this in Walter Benjamin, who during the 1930s collected thousands of quotations (mostly in French) about Paris, its glass and iron shopping arcades, its street fights, its shopgirls, its effects on Baudelaire and Marx. Adding comments (in German), ...”