Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism

In looking at the entirety of Benjamin's work -- rather than the four or five essays available in English which tend to form the Benjamin canon -- Esther Leslie offers powerful new insights into a key twentieth-century political thinker. She repositions Walter Benjamin's work in its historical and political context. In her examination of Benjamin's commentary on the politics and aesthetics of technology, from his work on nineteenth-century industrial culture to his analyses of the Nazi deployment of the bomber, Esther Leslie recontextualizes Benjamin's writings in a lucid and cogently argued new study.