Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
On Goethe

On Goethe

Benjamin, Walter
Fenves, Peter
McLaughlin, Kevin

Paperback

Series: Cultural Memory in the Present

PhilosophyLiterary Criticism

ISBN10: 1503642224
ISBN13: 9781503642225
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: Apr 29 2025
Pages: 382
Weight: 1.20
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

On Goethe contains the full range of Walter Benjamin's reflections on the central figure in modern German culture. The writings in this volume--newly translated, fully annotated, and framed by an extensive introduction--display a variety of styles and cover a vast array of topics. The collection revolves around two strikingly different essays. Whereas Goethe's Elective Affinities develops a theory of critique in which a work is illuminated wholly from within itself, an article Benjamin wrote on Goethe for the Soviet Encyclopedia represents his first large-scale attempt to elaborate a historical-materialist methodology. The other thirty translations stand in similarly productive tension with one another. Some are concerned with concepts of beauty and categories of the aesthetic, others with the relation of art to politics and the status of classical authors in contemporary culture, and still others with what remains of humanistic traditions in the wake of their disappearance under fascist regimes and what synthesis is required for the construction of a historical object. The volume provides a glimpse into the laboratory of Benjamin's thought, while granting readers a series of insights into the epochal phenomena that gather around the name Goethe.

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