Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with The Arcades Project (Boundary)

The Arcades Project is the unfinished, final work of influential cultural theorist, critic, and historian Walter Benjamin. Until 1999, this huge, unruly manuscript, which provides a more complete picture of the diversity of Benjamin’s work than formerly available, had not been fully translated into English. Benjamin Now is the first collection of essays in English to focus on The Arcades Project.

While this essential text’s title refers to its ostensible subject—the nineteenth-century shopping arcades of Paris—The Arcades Project is a mass of cultural, political, and social material presented in the form of a vast montage. Benjamin Now reconsiders the significance of his theories and writings in light of this final project. The contributors gathered in this special issue—several of whom participated in the translation of The Arcades Project—include leading scholars from modern culture and media studies, comparative literature and literary studies, art history, philosophy, cultural studies, and film studies.

Contributors. T. J. Clark, Howard Eiland, Peter Fenves, Tom Gunning, Michael Jennings, Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Kevin McLaughlin, Philip Rosen, Henry Sussman, Lindsay Waters, Samuel Weber, Peter Wollen