- Benjamin's -abilities
- Samuel Weber
- In this book, Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin’s thought by focusing the critical suffix “-ability” that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin’s thought by way of his language—and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin’s work ever written.
- Hardcover 2008
- Finding a Replacement for the Soul
- Brett Bourbon
- Bourbon asserts that our complex and variable relation with language defines a domain of meaning and being that is misconstrued and missed in philosophy, in literary studies, and in our ordinary understanding of what we are and how things make sense. Accordingly, his book seeks to demonstrate how the study of literature gives us the means to understand this relationship.
- Hardcover 2004
- Friends of Interpretable Objects
- Miguel Tamen
- Tamen's concern is to show how inanimate objects take on life through their interpretation--notably, in our own culture, as they are collected and housed in museums. It is his claim that an object becomes interpretable only in the context of a "society of friends." Thus, he suggests, our inveterate tendency as human beings to interpret the phenomenal world gives objects not only a life but also a society.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2004
- From a Logical Point of View
- W. V. Quine
- Hardcover 1961 / Paperback
- In Praise of Athletic Beauty
- Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
- A book that looks beyond the usual explanations of why sports fascinates, In Praise of Athletic Beauty also strives for a language that can frame the pleasure we take in watching athletic events. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht argues that the fascination with watching sports is probably the most popular and potent contemporary form of aesthetic experience. Exploring athletic beauty, this book makes us understand the widespread passion sport inspires as an untamed form of aesthetic fascination.
- Hardcover 2006
- The Naked Gaze
- Carlos Rojas
- This volume focuses on tropes of visuality and gender to reflect on shifting understandings of the significance of Chineseness, modernity, and Chinese modernity. Through detailed readings of narrative works by eight authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the study identifies three distinct constellations of visual concerns corresponding to the late imperial, mid-twentieth century, and contemporary periods, respectively.
- Hardcover 2008
- Premises
- Werner Hamacher
- Peter Fenves, Translator
- "Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself," wrote Paul Celan. Werner Hamacher's investigations into crucial texts of philosophical and literary modernity show that Celan's apothegm is also valid for the structure of understanding and for language in general.
- Hardcover 1997
- The Symptom of Beauty
- Francett Pacteau
- Pacteau tells us beauty is generic term for an unspecifiable number of disparate experiences. What these experiences are, what they mean, how they manifest themselves as a notion of beauty is the subject of Pacteau's book, an intriguing psychoanalytic study of beauty that looks into the eye of the beholder and into the mind conjuring behind it.
- Paperback 1995 / Hardcover
- Theodor W. Adorno
- Detlev Claussen
- Translated by Rodney Livingstone
- This book gives us our first clear look at how the man and his moment met to create “critical theory.” An intimate picture of the quintessential twentieth-century transatlantic intellectual, the book is also a window on the cultural ferment of Adorno’s day—and its ongoing importance in our own.
- Hardcover 2008
- Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926
- Walter Benjamin
- Marcus Bullock, Editor
- Michael W. Jennings, Editor
- This first volume shows that even as a young man Benjamin possessed astonishing intellectual range and depth. His topics here include poetry and fiction, drama, philosophy, history, religion, love, violence, morality, mythology, painting, and much more. He is as compelling and insightful when musing on riddles or children's books as he is when dealing with weightier issues such as symbolic logic or epistemology.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 2004
- Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 1, 1927-1930
- Walter Benjamin
- Series edited by Michael W. Jennings
- Series edited by Howard Eiland
- Series edited by Gary Smith
- In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, Benjamin emerged as the most original public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts. In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers.
- Paperback 2005
- Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 2, 1931-1934
- Walter Benjamin
- Series edited by Michael W. Jennings
- Series edited by Gary Smith
- Series edited by Howard Eiland
- Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts. Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, "Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the extended autobiographical meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.
- Paperback 2005
- Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935-1938
- Walter Benjamin
- Howard Eiland, Editor
- Michael W. Jennings, Editor
- Radical critic of a European civilization plunging into darkness, yet commemorator of the humane traditions of the old bourgeoisie--such was Walter Benjamin in the later 1930s. This volume, the third in a four-volume set, offers twenty-seven brilliant pieces, nineteen of which have never before been translated.
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2006
- Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940
- Walter Benjamin
- Edited by Howard Eiland
- Edited by Michael W. Jennings
- This volume ranges from studies of Baudelaire, Brecht, and the historian Carl Jochmann to appraisals of photography, film, and poetry. At their core is the question of how art adapts to survive and thrive in an age of violence and repression. The book is remarkable for its inquiry into the nature of "the modern," for its ideas about the transmogrification of art and the radical discontinuities of history, and for its examples of humane life and thought in the midst of barbarism.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2006
- Weird English
- Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien
- Weird English explores experimental and unorthodox uses of English by multilingual writers traveling from the canonical works of Nabokov and Hong Kingston to the less critiqued linguistic terrain of Junot Díaz and Arundhati Roy. Ch'ien looks at how the collision of other languages with English invigorated and propelled the evolution of language in the twentieth century and beyond.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2005
- Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences
- Philip Fisher
- In three instructive instances--a pair of paintings by Cy Twombly, the famous problem of doubling the area of a square, and the history of attempts to explain rainbows--Philip Fisher examines the experience of wonder as it draws together pleasure, thinking, and the aesthetic features of thought. Through these examples he places wonder in relation to the ordinary and the everyday as well as to its opposite, fear.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2003
- The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
- Walter Benjamin
- Edited by Michael W. Jennings
- Edited by Brigid Doherty
- Edited by Thomas Y. Levin
- Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art” essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on media and on culture in general. This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the “Work of Art” essay—the one that addresses the utopian developments of the modern media. The collection tracks Benjamin’s observations on the media as they are revealed in essays on the production and reception of art; on film, radio, and photography; and on the modern transformations of literature and painting.
- Paperback 2008