The Late Walter Benjamin

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A startling critical-creative examination of one of the 20th Century's leading thinkers, The Late Walter Benjamin is a documentary novel that juxtaposes the life and death of Walter Benjamin with the days, hours and minutes of a working-class council estate on the edge of London in post-war Austerity England. The novel centres on one particular tenant who claims to be Walter Benjamin, and only ever uses words written by Benjamin, apparently oblivious that the real Benjamin committed suicide 20 years earlier whilst fleeing the Nazis. Initially set in the sixties, the text slips back to the early years of the estate and to Benjamin's last days, as he moves across Europe seeking ever-more desperately to escape the Third Reich. Through this fictional narrative, John Schad explores not only the emergence of Benjamin's thinking from a politicised Jewish theology forced to confront the rise of Nazism but also the implications of his utopian Marxism, forged in exile, for the very different context of a displaced working class community in post-war Britain.

Reviews

says something previously unsaid about not only about Walter Benjamin but post-war Austerity Britain...and does so on the basis of rigorous historical and philosophical analysis. -- Esther Leslie, University of London, UK
...mixes apparently autobiographical fiction and social history with astute critical reworking of many of Walter Benjamin's most important ideas -- J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine, USA
as fascinating as the most experimental avant-garde mobilizations of literature during the interwar period. Stein, Breton, Pirandello and Pessoa come to mind. -- Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University, USA
This is a witty, smart novel that combines literary criticism with philosophy and local historyThis book will delight and challenge readers and admirers of Benjamin, and it will intrigue anyone interested in intellectual and social history. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All Readers. -- M. Uebel, University of Texas * CHOICE *
In this regard, The Late Walter Benjamin performs an ethic best phrased by Benjamin himself: If a person close to us is dying, we greet him. The novel treats seriously and often radically both the notions of dying and greeting; they are its ethical and narrative cornerstones. -- Niall Gildea * The Glass *

Author Bio

John Schad is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Lancaster.