work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility

Influenced by Bachofen, Benjamin gave the name 'auratic perception' to the aesthetic faculty through which civilization would recover a lost appreciation of myth. His work is widely cited in academic and literary studies, in particular his essays The Task of the Translator and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

As a literary scholar, he translated the Tableaux Parisiens edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal as well as Proust's In Search of Lost Time. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem.Īs a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas drawn from historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was a novel contribution to western philosophy, Marxism, and aesthetic theory. Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. In the context of his passionate engagement with questions of aesthetics, the scope of Benjamin's media theory can be fully appreciated. The volume contains some of Benjamin's best-known work alongside fascinating, little-known essays-some appearing for the first time in English. The collection tracks Benjamin's observations on the media as they are revealed in essays on the production and reception of art on film, radio, and photography and on the modern transformations of literature and painting. This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the 'Work of Art' essay the one that addresses the utopian developments of the modern media. Long before Marshall McLuhan, Benjamin saw that the way a bullet rips into its victim is exactly the way a movie or pop song lodges in the soul.

This essay, however, is only the beginning of a vast collection of writings that the editors have assembled to demonstrate what was revolutionary about Benjamin's explorations on media. In this essay the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought. Benjamin’s famous 'Work of Art' essay sets out his boldest thoughts-on media and on culture in general-in their most realized form, while retaining an edge that gets under the skin of everyone who reads it.

Work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility