“Unpacking My Library”
While going through a divorce, Benjamin wrote this essay inspired by having to relocate nearly two-thousands books from one home to another. The essay considers the philosophical aspects of unpacking books which become scattered throughout a room in a way that destroys all the existing order in place when they were shelved. The acquisition of the library which winds up in boxes and then scattered and then reordered expands into recollections of the various means by which individual volumes are purchase or other collected. The process of unboxing becomes an exercise in channeling memories buried deep and half-forgotten as the past associated with the books come alive in the mind.
“The Task of the Translator”
An essay seeking to explain how the translation of a text can get as closer to the meaning of the original. Benjamin argues that this cannot be done through a word-for-word translation of a text because meaning is impossible of repeat from one language to the next simply through words. Ultimately, translation must come to be seen not as a process of replicating language, but rather as a process which focuses on form. Meaning is created not but the composition of words, but through the structural architecture of language which created context and connotation which would be missing from merely translating the text as a collection of words.
Ostensibly and analysis of the stories of Russian author Nikolai Leskov. This is merely the introduction into a much more complex and expansive examination of the increasing loss of storytellers in literature. The storyteller belongs to the age of the past when experience informed narrative. The modern world has changed the very dynamics of existence so much that experience has lost meaning. Industrialization has had the effect of removing many daily experiences which used to be common across cultures. In addition, the horrific machine of industrialization has created experiences which writers don’t want to revisit. Predicting the rise of the information age, Benjamin also theorizes that the myth and legend of storytelling is too subject to investigation and explain of factual foundations.
“Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death”
The re-examination of Kafka’s literature a decade following his death becomes a philosophical expounding upon the metaphysical nature of the author’s stories. Within Kafka’s body of work, Benjamin notes recurring themes of how individuals are psychologically pursued by the idea of Original Sin. One particularly interesting insight is the way that Benjamin outlines how Kafka can be read not so much as a teller of dark, dystopian modern urban horror stories, but of parables which ironically work not to convey a moral message, but to disguise it.
“What is Epic Theater?”
This is one of the rare writings by Walter Benjamin which directly addresses the subject covered by its title without digressing into a more abstract metaphorical examination of that subject. The essay outlines in individual sections the components which serve to identify “epic theater.” These include: the need for the audience to be relaxed, which translates into not coercing them to emotionally confuse dramatic interpretation with real life; a plot which is ideally set in an identifiable time; a story which centers around a hero that is not destined for tragedy; the structural necessity for interruption of the dramatic narrative; a stylistic form of acting in which the player creates what Benjamin calls the “quotable gesture” and, most important of all, that that play is didactic in the sense of creating interaction between actors and audience.
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
This is not just Benjamin’s most famous work—by far—but also one of the essential key texts in modern critical thought. The basic premise analyzes the consequence of the ability for mass reproductions of works of art for the first time in history with the arrival of the machinery of the twentieth-century. That consequence is one in which the original work of art has lost what Benjamin terms its “aura” in the face of the ability to reproduce it. What was once unique about any work of art—but especially something like the Mona Lisa—no longer possesses the same value, or least the same kind of value which is divorced from consumer value, as it did when only one existed or even when on the ability to reproduce on a singular scale existed.
“Theses on the Philosophy of History”
This is the last essay that Benjamin was able to complete before his attempted escape from the Nazis in 1940 ended tragically in suicide. It is comprised of short numbered paragraphs which do not lead logically from one to the next in a linear order, but are nevertheless thematically unified by the imagery laid out in the opening section. The first paragraph , is an allegorical fable involving a chess-playing automaton appearing as a puppet wearing Turkish clothing but which was actually controlled by a hunchbacked chess master hiding inside. The actual subject of the allegory is “historical materialism” which wins every time and also happens to be what the puppet is called. From that point on, the paragraphs become a philosophical critique of historical materialism that is conveyed largely through metaphor, allusion, allegory and history.
