In the Language of Walter Benjamin

This text collects Carol Jacobs' essays, written over several decades, which attempt to come to terms with the implication of Walter Benjamin's challenging work. Jacobs discerns an approach that lifts reading out of mere communication and into self-conscious interpretation. While sentences begin and end, Walter Benjamin observed, everything else in writing - genre, ideas, allusions, readings, the word themselves - is perpetually "in medias". For Benjamin, digression was a method, and interruption a place for truth. For Carol Jacobs, to read Benjamin is to learn to read. This text collects Carol Jacobs' essays, written over several decades, which attempt to come to terms with the implication of Benjamin's challenging work. His invitations to literary criticism are numerous, Jacobs notes, beyond his own essays on drama, poetry and fiction. He experimented with autobiography ("Moscow Diary") and with history ("Berlin Chronicle") and his "The Task of the Translator" is perhaps one of the most highly regarded essays of the 20th century. In this diversity and insight, Jacobs discerns an approach that lifts reading out of mere communication and into self-conscious interpretation, into an experience of construction and memory.

The process of contemplation that these essays perform, then, is marked by an unceasing pausing for breath (sometimes for many years)."-Carol Jacobs, from In the Language of Walter Benjamin If Walter Benjamin (with an irony that belies his seemingly tragic life) is now recognized as one of the century's most important writers, reading him is no easy matter. Benjamin opens one of his most notable essays, "The Task of the Translator", with the words "No poem is intended for the reader, no image for the beholder, no symphony for the listener". How does one read an author who tells us that writing does not communicate very much to the reader? How does one learn to regard what comes to us from Benjamin as something other than direct expression? Carol Jacobs' In the Language of Walter Benjamin is an attempt to come to terms with this predicament. It does so by teasing out such guidelines for criticism as Benjamin seems to offer in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Jacobs reminds us of Benjamin's distinction between truth and knowledge. She above all insists on his method of philosophical contemplation as performance, on a performance that demands precise immersion in the minute details of subject matter.