Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2000 19:42:40 -0400
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org>
Subject: ROSEN ON BENJAMIN


I don't recall any activity on this list for months, since I enquired about
Benjamin's intensive method of literary criticism.  It's not like I've been
doing anything with Benjamin myself, but anyway, I just read an essay which
gave me some real inspiration regarding Benjamin, which is good for me,
given my chronic ineptitude and misreading whenever I turn my attention
toward him.  The essay in question is:

Rosen, Charles.  "The Ruins of Walter Benjamin: German and English Baroque
Drama, Romantic Aesthetics, and Symbolist Theory of Language", in: ROMANTIC
POETS, CRITICS, AND OTHER MADMEN (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1998), pp. 131-181.  

Rosen aims to follow the career of Benjamin and show how he alienated
everyone from his doctoral dissertation committee on.  Rosen spends the
bulk of his essay on THE ORIGIN OF GERMAN TRAUERSPIEL, detailing why it
scandalized the critical establishment, its originality, its treatment of
history, genre, etc.  Though I don't recall the exact term being used, the
issues raised in our previous decision of intensive criticism are presented
here: two points of view regarding the work of art, and the degree to which
it is an artifact of history  compared to what survives in a later epoch,
and the differences between reading a work as a live literary text and as a
"ruin".

This is an enormously interesting treatment, but a number of other tidbits
fly by as one reads later in the essay, such as Benajmin's antagonizing the
litereary commissars with his remarks on socialist realism, the meaning of
the concept of aura in the mwechanical reproduction essay, and Adorno's
misunderstanding of Benjamin's method.

My crude summary does not do this essay justice.  It's packed with lots of
useful information, most of it new to me as a novice in this area.



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