Courses

In 1936, the exiled German-Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin wrote, “A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.”

Few thinkers or writers have as poignantly articulated how human experience is formed by crisis. Early in his career, he conceptualized a sudden departure from 19th-century modes of experience—a departure brought on by World War I and other developments in early 20th century European history. Between philosophy and history, Benjamin charted a course toward a new mode of experience in the midst of a growing social and political crisis.

Benjamin’s methodology was critique, a specifically historical way of analyzing transformative events and experiences. We will read the texts in which Benjamin tests out formative, critical experiences such as a child’s perception of color, fate and character, the violence of the law, mourning, memory, new media such as film and radio, and his writings on authors such as Baudelaire, Proust, Brecht, and Kafka.

Our reading will proceed roughly chronologically, as Benjamin’s attention shifted from theorizing experience to reflecting on Marxism, Nazism, and other political and social trends. Given Benjamin’s important contributions to a vast number of fields, we will be reading texts in political theory, literary theory, art history, film, and media studies.