Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The contemporary significance of the Walter Benjamin's philosophy and cultural criticism lies in his radical and in many ways prescient investigation of the relationship between word and image. While the post-war reception of his work emphasized the linguistic theory underlying his cultural criticism it is now increasingly appreciated that his writings on art and aesthetics proposed in addition an original and philosophically provocative account of visual experience. His early writings during and immediately after the First World War pioneered the confrontation between visual and linguistic modes of experience that came to characterize his writings of the 1920s and 1930s. The most prominent and debated point at which Benjamin discusses the interaction between the visual and the linguistic modes of experience remains the theory of allegory developed in his book Origins of German Tragic Drama (1928), a theory whose roots in Benjamin's early philosophic and aesthetic writings and its development in his work of the 1930s is often not fully appreciated.The tension between word and image that characterizes Benjamin's theory of allegory emerges from his early philosophic and aesthetic reflections upon the linguistic and visual character of experience. His extensive critique of Kant and Neo-Kantianism, developed during the second decade of the century in numerous fragments and in the essay ... log in or subscribe to read full text