Topics in German Intellectual History: Walter Benjamin: Media, Memory, Melancholy

Walter Benjamin—a humanist, social-scientist, and media theorist in one—is among the most original thinkers of the 20th century. This seminar is a deep introduction to his work and its wide influence from the Frankfurt School to deconstruction and anthropocene thought. We will study Benjamin’s philosophies of language and of art; his theories of media experience, of urban and architectural space, and of childhood; his critiques of violence and of history; his studies of surrealism, Kafka, Brecht, and the baroque; as well as his style of writing, form of thought, and coining of concepts such as storyteller, dialectical image, and aura.