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'''Walter Benjamin''' ([[July 15]], [[1892]] – [[– September 27]], [[1940]]) was a [[Germany|German]] [[Jew]]ish [[Jewish Marxist]] [[literary critic]] and [[philosopher]]. He was at times associated with the [[Frankfurt School]] of [[critical theory]], and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of [[Bertolt Brecht]] and the Jewish mysticism of [[Gershom Scholem]].
==Life and work==
Benjamin was known during his life as an essayist, translator and literary critic. Since the appearance of his ''Schriften'' in 1955, 15 years after his death, Benjamin's work has been the subject of numerous books and essays. As a [[cultural sociology|sociological]] and [[cultural criticism|cultural critic]] Benjamin combined ideas of [[judaism|Jewish]] [[mysticism]] with [[historical materialism]] in a body of work which was an entirely novel contribution to [[Marxist philosophy]] and aesthetic theory. As a literary scholar, he translated texts written by [[Marcel Proust]] and [[Charles Baudelaire]], and Benjamin's essay "The Task of the Translator" is one of the best-known texts about the theory of [[translation]].
The ''Passagenwerk'' or "Arcades Project", Benjamin's lifelong project, was to be an enormous collection of writings on the city life of [[Paris]] in the [[19th century]], especially concerned with the roofed outdoor "arcades" which created the city's distinctive street life and culture of [[flâneur|''flânerie'']]. The project, which many scholars believe might have become one of the great texts of 20th-century cultural criticism, was never completed; it has been posthumously edited and published in many languages in its unfinished form.
==Bibliography==
Many of Benjamin's writings have been translated into English.
* ''Illuminations''. ISBN 0805202412.
* ''Selected Writings'' in four volumes, from Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674945859 (vol. 1), ISBN 0674945867 (vol. 2), ISBN 0674008960 (vol. 3), ISBN 0674010760 (vol. 4).
* ''The Arcades Project''. ISBN 0674008022.
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