To great writers, Walter Benjamin once wrote, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives. Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--the theater, as Benjamin called it, of all my struggles and all my ideas.

Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as Fashion, Boredom, Dream City, Photography, Catacombs, Advertising, Prostitution, Baudelaire, and Theory of Progress. His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.

The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed true history that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by progress, Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

Formato	Tapa suave
Número de Páginas	1088
Lenguaje	Inglés
Editorial	Belknap Press
Fecha de Publicación	2002-03-30
Dimensiones	10.3" x 6.3" x 1.86" pulgadas
Descripción de Edición	Revised
Letra Grande	No
Con Ilustraciones	Si
Temas	Francés, Alemania

Eiland, Howard

Howard Eiland is an editor and translator of Benjamin's writings.

McLaughlin, Kevin

Kevin McLaughlin is Assistant Professor of English at Brown University and the author of Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Literature.

Benjamin, Walter

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was the author of many works of literary and cultural analysis.