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  • Published: 29 October 2009
  • ISBN: 9780141932279
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304

One-Way Street and Other Writings



Introduction by Amit Chaudhuri; translated by J.A. Underwood

Walter Benjamin - philosopher, essayist, literary and cultural theorist - was one of the most original writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. This new selection brings together Benjamin's major works, including 'One-Way Street', his dreamlike, aphoristic observations of urban life in Weimar Germany; 'Unpacking My Library', a delightful meditation on book-collecting; the confessional 'Hashish in Marseille'; and 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', his seminal essay on how technology changes the way we appreciate art. Also including writings on subjects ranging from Proust to Kafka, violence to surrealism, this is the essential volume on one of the most prescient critical voices of the modern age.

Contains: 'Unpacking My Library'; 'One-Way Street'; 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'; 'Brief History of Photography'; 'Hashish in Marseille'; 'On the Critique of Violence'; 'The Job of the Translator'; 'Surrealism'; 'Franz Kafka' and 'Picturing Proust'.

  • Published: 29 October 2009
  • ISBN: 9780141932279
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304

About the authors

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a philosopher, translator and critic. Born in Berlin into a prosperous Jewish family, he made a precarious living as a literary journalist, championing the drama of Bertolt Brecht and translating the work of Baudelaire and Proust. He is most famous for his essays ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923) and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936). With the rise of the Nazis in 1933, he emigrated for Paris, and in 1940 he fled for the Spanish border, where he committed suicide.