the belknapp press of harvard university press cambridge ma london uk (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: New. 1st Edition. META-CLASSIC: MONUMENTAL: NEW First Edition hardcover (Orig. 1999) Unstated First Printing, NEW handsomely-designed unpriced mylar-protected jacket, NEW cover w/ library-durable navy-blue fabric wrapping spine & extending 2.36" onto front & back panels covered in slate-blue paper w/ a portrait of Walter Benjamin printed blue-on-blue on front panel, STRIKING "electric-blue" card-stock end-papers, EXCELLENT unblemished smooth-cut text-block exterior, NEW sewn binding w/ tight signatures, PRISTINE interior handsomely printed in Adobe Bethold Baskerville Book & Bodoni on 45-pound Glatfelter Offset Hi-Opaque paper * 6.86" x 10.18" x 2.12", 1.86 kg, xiv+1074 (1098) pp * ABOUT THE BOOK: "To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 & still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, "The Arcades Project" (in German "Das Passagen-Werk") is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of 13 years: "the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles & all my ideas." Focusing on the arcades of 19th-century Paris--glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, & reflections on, 100s of published sources, arranging them in 36 categories w/ descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," & "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age. "The Arcades Project" is Benjamin's effort to represent & to critique the bourgeois experience of 19th-century history, &, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street & interior merge & historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions & displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things. * HIGHEST PRAISE: "Quite simply, 'The Arcades Project' is one of the 20th-century's greatest efforts of historical comprehension, even in its fragmentary form. And the fragmentary form is in any case not untrue to Benjamin's over-all intentions. The book would surely have remained a palimpsest of quotations, for reasons Benjamin several times explains in his writings: the palimpsest is Benjamin's form, his own eccentric effort at totalization." -T.J. Clark, author of "Farewell to an Idea" * "More than half a century after it was composed, Walter Benjamin's fragmentary 'Arcades Project' still surpasses all other historiographic projects on the 19th-century & its capital, Paris. 'The Arcades Project' remains unequaled in the wealth of perspectives it offers, & no other study has come close to its methodological inventiveness or so exemplarily met its demand that history writing be reinvented for every topic & on every occasion. Benjamin's work is the most advanced, most complex, & most comprehensive study of the dominant motifs of the 19th century--motifs that continue to be critically important for us today." -Werner Hamacher, author of 'Premises' * SHIPPING: MNEMOSYNE carefully wraps, labels & custom-packages this fine book for FREE domestic shipment via USPS MEDIA MAIL or USPS PRIORITY MAIL for a below-cost additional fee & due to its weight to international destinations via postal-regulation-mandated USPS INTERNATIONAL PRIORITY AIRMAIL at nation-by-nation rates available on request.