The period 1985-1995 saw a new wave of interest, in philosophical and theoretical circles, in the writings of Walter Benjamin, associate of the early Frankfurt School and among the most innovative and uncategorizable of German modernist thinkers. It is against the horizon of the contemporary theoretical scene, combining impulses from post-structuralism, feminism, cultural anthropology, and psychoanalysis, that Sigrid Weigel, one of Germany's leading Benjamin experts, undertakes her re-reading of his work. The subject of this sequence of eleven essays, assembled here for the first time in...
The period 1985-1995 saw a new wave of interest, in philosophical and theoretical circles, in the writings of Walter Benjamin, associate of the early ...
The period 1985-1995 saw a new wave of interest, in philosophical and theoretical circles, in the writings of Walter Benjamin, associate of the early Frankfurt School and among the most innovative and uncategorizable of German modernist thinkers. It is against the horizon of the contemporary theoretical scene, combining impulses from post-structuralism, feminism, cultural anthropology, and psychoanalysis, that Sigrid Weigel, one of Germany's leading Benjamin experts, undertakes her re-reading of his work. The subject of this sequence of eleven essays, assembled here for the first time in...
The period 1985-1995 saw a new wave of interest, in philosophical and theoretical circles, in the writings of Walter Benjamin, associate of the early ...
Rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, modernity tends to privilege masculine-connoted characteristics -- conscious subjective agency, rational control and self-containment, the subjugation of nature -- and has generated a conceptualization of human subjectivity emphasizing these qualities. Yet the costs of this conception of human selfhood are high, and at modernity's most acute moments of historical crisis writers and artists can be seen turning to feminine-connoted figurations -- nature, tradition, myth and spirituality, intuition, relationality, flux. In recent decades studies have examined...
Rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, modernity tends to privilege masculine-connoted characteristics -- conscious subjective agency, rational control ...
In her 2007 poem cycle "Niemands Frau," Barbara Kohler returns to Homer's "Odyssey," not to retell it, but to take up some of the threads it has woven into the cultural tradition of the West - and to unravel them, just as Penelope, the wife of the hero who called himself Nobody, unravelled each night the web she re-wove by day. Kohler's return to the "Odyssey" takes place under the sign of a grammatical shift, from 'er' to 'sie', from the singular hero to a plurality of female voices - Nausicaa, Circe, Calypso, Ino Leucothea, Helen and Penelope herself - with implications for thinking about...
In her 2007 poem cycle "Niemands Frau," Barbara Kohler returns to Homer's "Odyssey," not to retell it, but to take up some of the threads it has woven...