![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I didn’t quite manage the nice handout I envisioned, but as I put together my remarks I gathered a little data, and so this post relates the explorations I made. I had wanted to bring to that roundtable a couple of quick factoids from that reception history using JSTOR’s archive of scholarly journals. Anyway it made me want to think more about the reception history of this essay. On Monday I participated in a roundtable discussing Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”/“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Rereading this essay after not having looked at it in five years or so, I was struck by the degree to which Benjamin anticipated (or, better, laid the groundwork for) both the rhetoric and the analytic procedures of contemporary historicist literary criticism and cultural studies: coordinating large social-structural changes with changes in artistic genres and artistic values attending to popular culture alongside high culture and, especially, announcing the imperative to “politicize art.” This is not quite as banal as might seem-after all, Benjamin was not an academic, and this famous essay is not a work of literary criticism or of philology. This post could also be called: Walter Benjamin in the Age of Me Noodling Around with Small Data. ![]()
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