This thoughtfully planned edition of Benjamin's early writings will afford readers who may only be familiar with his later canonical work a sense of the range and force of the initial phases of Benjamin's intellectual formation. Those who thought they knew Benjamin will warmly welcome these magical and charming essays, poems, stories, fragments, and dialogues from Benjamin's metaphysics of youth. -- Gerhard Richter, University of California, Davis In Early Writings, Howard Eiland covers the earliest period of Benjamin's extant oeuvre that helped form the critical project that dominated his literary and philosophical career. This volume's range provides a comprehensive account of Benjamin's development from an ardent advocate of youth and educational reform to a philosophically committed critic of literature. -- David Ferris, University of Colorado at Boulder
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was the author of many works of literary and cultural analysis. Howard Eiland is an editor and translator of Benjamin's writings.
This thoughtfully planned edition of Benjamin's early writings will
afford readers who may only be familiar with his later canonical
work a sense of the range and force of the initial phases of
Benjamin's intellectual formation. Those who thought they knew
Benjamin will warmly welcome these magical and charming essays,
poems, stories, fragments, and dialogues from Benjamin's
metaphysics of youth. -- Gerhard Richter, University of California,
Davis
In Early Writings, Howard Eiland covers the earliest period
of Benjamin's extant oeuvre that helped form the critical project
that dominated his literary and philosophical career. This volume's
range provides a comprehensive account of Benjamin's development
from an ardent advocate of youth and educational reform to a
philosophically committed critic of literature. -- David Ferris,
University of Colorado at Boulder
This is a valuable addition to the available work in English of one
of the seminal Jewish critical thinkers of the 20th century, author
of the massive Arcades Project. The mostly lambent
translations by editor Eiland and others...help place Benjamin's
later work within the context of his early preoccupations. *
Publishers Weekly *
Early Writings (1910-1917) [is] the latest volume to appear
in Harvard University Press' Benjamin edition--an exemplary
scholarly project that has now been ongoing for 25 years...In these
seven years, from the ages of 18 to 25, it's possible to see
Benjamin develop from a precocious, pompous adolescent into a
daring and profound thinker. The latest pieces in the book--in
particular "The Life of Students," "Trauerspiel and Tragedy," and
"On Language as Such and the Language of Man"--lead directly to his
most important insights into the nature of literature and history.
In fact, the last of these, never published in Benjamin's lifetime,
can be seen as a kind of skeleton key to his mature work, full of
overtly mystical beliefs that would go underground when Benjamin
became a professed Communist...One of the things that makes
Benjamin so fascinating is the way he seems to translate Jewish
ways of thinking into a post-Jewish intellectual culture. Early
Writings shows that this fertile dualism was present from the
very beginning. -- Adam Kirsch * Tablet Magazine *
In the introduction, editor and translator Eiland does a wonderful
job of explaining how the essays relate to events in Benjamin's
early adult life and to the evolution of his theories...These
pieces offer the reader valuable insight into Benjamin's
philosophical thought. -- Scott Duimstra * Library Journal *
This well-planned, beautifully translated volume collects
Benjamin's earliest writings and is a welcome addition to the
corpus of his contributions to the fields of philosophy,
aesthetics, politics, and literary criticism. From his first
attempts as an author in 1910 when he was a student in Munich,
Benjamin refined his voice as one of Europe's most independent,
fiercely metaphysical writers. Here Eiland et al. allow the reader
to witness the emergence of the themes that would occupy Benjamin
in the productive decades to follow: language and truth, historical
memory, the relation of experience to the active life. The 45
original, direct pieces collected here constitute a crucial context
for his developing thought. This collection stands alongside
Benjamin's Selected Writings, ed. by Marcus Bullock and
Michael Jennings as more evidence of Benjamin's stature as a
thinker of world-historical force. Those interested in philosophy,
letters, German literature, and intellectual history will
undoubtedly find this volume immensely fruitful. -- M. Uebel *
Choice *
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