We envision this working group as something of a salon where faculty
and graduate students will be able to discuss the work of Walter Benjamin. In contrast
to other Townsend groups devoted to Critical Theory, our aim is not solely to read
Benjamin and his contemporaries, but to read with him—to read what he read and take
time to look at what he saw. We wish to put Benjamin’s thought in dialogue with the
philosophers, thinkers, artists, and cities with which he was engaged—especially those
cultural phenomena and texts that are now less frequently read than his own works. In
doing so, we hope to illuminate how aspects of Benjamin’s method of cultural criticism
might have developed; to reconnect Benjamin’s writings to the primary sources to which
he was responding, and thereby work toward an understanding of the Frankfurt School
that is better attuned to the earlier intellectual and political debates out of which it
emerged; and to offer the Berkeley community a chance to encounter together, what, at
present, lies on the periphery of the critical theory canon. Because Benjamin’s thought
is characteristically interdisciplinary, and because the objects of his critical work were
hardly limited to a single medium, the working group would have little trouble attracting
people from multiple disciplines and historical periods. In particular, such a group
would be especially inviting for those in Film & Media Studies; English; Rhetoric; Critical
Theory; German; French; Comparative Literature; Performance Studies; History; and
Philosophy.
