McCole, John
Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition

In a landmark interpretation of the whole of Benjamin's career, John McCole demonstrates a way of understanding Benjamin that both contextualizes and addresses the complexities and ambiguities of his texts. Working with Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the "intellectual field," McCole traces Benjamin's deep ambivalence about cultural tradition through the longterm project - an immanent critique of German idealist and romantic aesthetics - which unites his writings. McCole builds a sustained reading of Benjamin's intellectual development which sheds new light on the formative role of early influences and shows how Benjamin later extended the strategies he learned within these contexts during key encounters with Weimar modernism, surrealism, and the fiction of Proust. XIII,329 Seiten, broschiert (Cornell University Press 1993) textsauber, mit leichten Gebrauchsspuren/clean text pages, minor traces of use