Constellations of Reading

Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality

By:

Carlo Salzani

Format:

Paperback / softback

Series:

Cultural History and Literary Imagination,

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Description

How to read Walter Benjamin today? This book argues that the proper way is through an approach which recognizes and respects his own peculiar theorization of the act of reading and the politics of interpretation that this entails. The approach must be figural, that is, focused on images, and driven by the notion of actualization. Figural reading, in the very sui generis Benjaminian way, understands figures as constellations, whereby an image of the past juxtaposes them with an image of the present and is thus actualized. To apply this method to Benjamin's own work means first to identify some figures. The book singles out the Flaneur, the Detective, the Prostitute and the Ragpicker, and then sets them alongside a contemporary account of the same figure: the Flaneur in Juan Goytisolo's Landscapes after the Battle (1982), the Detective in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (1987), the Prostitute in Dacia Maraini's Dialogue between a Prostitute and her Client (1973), and the Ragpicker in Mudrooroo's The Mudrooroo/Mueller Project (1993). The book thereby, on the one hand, analyses the politics of reading Benjamin today and, on the other, sets his work against a variety of contemporary aesthetics and politics of interpretation.

Author Biography:

The Author: Carlo Salzani completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University (Australia), to which he is now affiliated as a Research Associate. He is currently working as an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institut fur Germanistik, Vergleichende Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat Bonn (Germany).

Release date NZ

December 22nd, 2008

Author

Carlo Salzani

Audience

Professional & Vocational

Contributors

Series edited by Christian Emden
Series edited by David Robin Midgley

Edition

New edition

Pages

392

Series

Cultural History and Literary Imagination,

ISBN-13

9783039118601

Product ID

10575660

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