Will I love Illuminations?

This is the work of a cultural sage with deep wisdom to offer on how political issues affect culture, especially literature.

It illuminated to me how significant cultural artifacts of high modernity like the short story as a phenomenon, the work of Charles Baudelaire in relation to the city, the plays of Bertolt Brecht, and the stories of Franz Kafka - that I had once been uncomfortable with because of their density - mattered and needed to be engaged with to make sense of the intellectual currents of the age.

To take my place among a culturally aware Benjamin is… show more.

Like most of Benjamin’s essays and books, "The Work of Art" essay is a dialectical study of the material conditions of the possibility of the work of art in the context of the conditions of modern reproduction techniques. Benjamin delineates a visual phenomenology of the essential features of the traditional artwork (its singularity in time and place, its disengagement from mundane experience, its provocation of thought and reflection, and its local `auratic’ presence). This frames the background to the question of the fate of art in an era where the singular work of art can be replicated and endlessly reproduced… show more.