Radio Benjamin [Mīkstie vāki]

A complex and brilliant writer. -- JM Coetzee Walter Benjamin was one of the unclassifiable ones... whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre. -- Hannah Arendt Benjamin buckled himself to the task of revolutionary transformation. his life and work speak challengingly to us all. -- Terry Eagleton There has been no more original, no more serious critic and reader in our time. -- George Steiner He drew, from the obscure disdained German baroque, elements of the modern sensibility: the taste for allegory, surrealist shock effects, discontinuous utterance, a sense of historical catastrophe. -- Susan Sontag Walter Benjamin is the most important German aesthetician and literary critic of the twentieth century. * Sunday Times * Radio Benjamin could hardly be bettered... There really is no parallel for what Benjamin did in these talks. Imagine a particularly engaging episode of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time narrated by Alan Bennett - if Bennett were more profoundly steeped in Marx and politically engaged by the revolutionary potential of the medium of radio - and you have something of their allure. -- Stuart Jeffries This collection shows a lighter - though entirely characteristic - side to this most influential of 20th-century thinkers. -- Jonathan Gibbs * Independent * Walter Benjamin, one of the first theorists to ponder the social impact of mass media [ ...] was equally entranced by the way thin air mysteriously transmits radio waves. In 1927, five years before he exiled himself from Germany in advance of the Nazi putsch, Benjamin began a series of experimental broadcasts on this new medium. -- Peter Conrad * Observer *