Tag Archives: Walter Benjamin

Literary Characters, Mirrors of the Soul

Literary characters, according to Peter Brooks, help us understand “the most elusive and consequential issues of our limited human existence.

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To Understand Your Life, Read Novels

Theorist Peter Brooks contends that it is through novels that we find shape and meaning to our lives.

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How Capitalism Threatens Art

The Frankfurt School studied how culture gets subsumed by capitalism. We need to start reading Adorno and Benjamin again.

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It’s the End of the Book as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)

I crossed the great divide this Christmas and bought my wife a Kindle e-book.  I have to admit that convenience played a role in my decision.  Does it make it any more excusable that the first book she downloaded was a classic (The Brothers Karamazov)?  I didn’t think so. And here’s a problem I can report. […]

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Invading the Afterlife

My wife Julia and I visited the National Geographic Museum to see the Terracotta Warriors this past Friday. Even though only a few statues and artifacts from the vast archaeological digs in China were on display, we saw enough to be very impressed. Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, started constructing statues for […]

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