Profane Illumination
Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of California Press
Published:13th Mar '95
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Margaret Cohen's encounter with Walter Benjamin, one of the twentieth century's most influential cultural and literary critics, has produced a radically new reading of surrealist thought and practice. Cohen analyzes the links between Breton's surrealist fusion of psychoanalysis and Marxism and Benjamin's post-Enlightenment challenge to Marxist theory. She argues that Breton's surrealist Marxism played a formative role in shaping postwar French intellectual life and is of continued relevance to the contemporary intellectual scene.
""This challenging, often profound book investigates the 'visual rhetoric of understanding' manifest in surrealism's and Marxism's 'emancipatory vocabularies' and dream imagery. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin's and Andre Breton's theoretical, critical, and literary writings, Cohen posits a genre of 'Gothic Marxism, ' which owes much to Freud's psychoanalytic oeuvre. This genre links dialectical thinking, dreaming, and historical awakening with political, cultural, and artistic bricolage. . . . [In addition,] the book contains evocative illustrations." * CHOICE *
ISBN: 9780520201507
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 499g
271 pages