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

...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
Says something previously unsaid about not only 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
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 *
[A] clever, idiosyncratic novella The great value of Schads narrative is its attempt to uncover the sort of revolutionary energy in the story of a post-war North-London council estate that, for all its difficulties, managed somewhat heroically to create an environment defined above all by optimism, vitality, and buried glimpses of utopia. -- Alex Niven * Review 31 *

Author Bio

John Schad is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Lancaster, UK