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.
Their suggestive power, however, remains to haunt subsequent cultures, down to this century. The emblems of baroque allegory point to the extinct values of a classical world that they can never attain or repeat. The characteristic atmosphere of the Trauerspiel was consequently ‘melancholy’. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer, and the theatre of Shakespeare and Calderon. The Origin of German Tragic Drama begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of the royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Indeed, Georg Lukacs-one of the most trenchant opponents of Benjamin’s aesthetics-singled out this work as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin is widely acknowledged as amongst the greatest literary critics of this century, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama is his most sustained and original work.
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