Myth and Metropolis Walter Benjamin and the City [Paperback]

This is a lucid study of Walter Benjamin's lifelong fascination with the city and forms of metropolitan experience, highlighting the relevance of Benjamin's work to our contemporary understanding of modernity.Acknowledgements.

List of Abbreviations.

Introduction.

1. Urban Images: From Ruins to Revolutions.

2. Urban Memories: Labyrinth and Childhood.

3. Dialectical Images: Paris and the Phantasmagoria of Modernity.

4. Urban Allegories: Paris, Baudelaire and the Experience of Modernity.

Conclusion.

Notes.

Biography.

Index.

This is a highly stimulating contribution to our understanding of Benjamin's work on the city. It is one which is written with a commendable clarity that makes Benjamin's often complex investigations accessible to students without losing the rich textual diversity of Benjamin's own presentation of the city's labyrinths.
-- Professor David Frisby, Glasgow University

Walter Benjamin and his work on the metropolis is the topic of a new study by Graeme Gilloch, a study so rigorous in its scholarship and penetrating in its observations that it rises above the recent plethora of lesser works on Benjamin. This elegant study now displaces Susan Buck-Morss's Dialectics of Seeing as the most authoritative work on Benjamin and the city. Gilloch situates Benjamin's discussion of the city within his overall theoretical outlook, evocatively highlighting the surrealist, Marxist and Freudian impulses in Benjamin. The result is as convincing as it is charming. (Building Design)

[A] close and sensitive reading of Benjamin ... Since Gilloch's book is clearly and lucidly written, it can be recommended for teaching for students, although it is also an interestlÃ*