This book is the first to consider the presence of history and the question of historical practice in Walter Benjamin's work. Benjamin, the critic and philosopher of history, was also the practitioner, the authors contend, and it is in the practice of historical writing that the materialist aspect of his thought is most evident.

Some of the essays analyze Benjamin's writings in cultural history and the philosophy of history. Others connect his historical and theoretical practices to issues in contemporary feminism and post-colonial studies, and to cultural contexts including the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong. In different ways, the authors all find in Benjamin's specific notion of historical materialism a dialectic between textual and cultural analysis which can reinvigorate the relation between literary and historical studies.

About the Author
Michael P. Steinberg is Director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities and Professor of History and Music at Brown University. He is the author of Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival; Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History (both from Cornell); and Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music.

Reviews
"The essays offer an important range of views from an international array of historians and literary and cultural critics. These essays investigate Benjamin's engagement with the 'materiality of the past and the epistemology and ethics of its recuperation' the world made available 'in language but also beyond language.'"-Len Findlay, The Structuralist, 1997/1998
"The focus on Benjamin and the question of history is extremely welcome. Because Benjamin has been and remains so influential in a variety of academic disciplines, this important scholarly counterweight to the outpouring of more specialized monographic studies is a highly useful contribution."-Richard Wolin, Rice University



Book Information
ISBN 9780801482571
Author Michael P. Steinberg
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 19mm