Walter Benjamin Reimagined: A Graphic Translation of Poetry, Prose, Aphorisms, and Dreams

Walter Benjamin Reimagined: A Graphic Translation of Poetry, Prose, Aphorisms, and Dreams

Frances Cannon, Esther Leslie (Foreword by)
$24.95
Publication Date: May 7th, 2019
Publisher:
The MIT Press
ISBN:
9780262039963
Pages:
184

Description

An illuminated tour of Walter Benjamin's ideas; a graphic translation; an encyclopedia of fragments.

Walter Benjamin was a man of letters, an art critic, an essayist, a translator, a philosopher, a collector, and an urban flâneur. In his writings, he ambles, samples, and explores. With Walter Benjamin Reimagined, Frances Cannon offers a visual and literary response to Benjamin's work. With detailed and dreamlike pen-and-ink drawings and hand-lettered text, Cannon gives readers an illuminated tour of Walter Benjamin's thoughts—a graphic translation, an encyclopedia of fragments.

Cannon has not created a guide to Benjamin's greatest ideas—this is not an illustrated Walter Benjamin cheat sheet—but rather a beautifully rendered work of graphic literature. Cannon doesn't plod through thickets of minutiae; she strolls—a flâneuse herself—using Benjamin's words and her own drawings to construct a creative topography of Benjamin's writing. Phrases from “Unpacking My Library,” for example, are accompanied by images of flying papers, stray books, stacked books—books “not yet touched by the mild boredom of order”—and a bearded mage. Cannon takes the reader through different periods of Benjamin's writing: “Artifacts of Youth,” nostalgic musings on his childhood; “Fragments of a Critical Eye,” early writings, political observations, and cultural criticism; “Athenaeum of Imagination,” meditations on philosophy and psychology; “A Stroll through the Arcades,” Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus; and “A Collection of Dreams and Stories,” experimental and fantastical writings.

With drawings and text, Cannon offers a phantasmagorical tribute to Benjamin's wandering eye.

About the Author

Frances Cannon is a writer, professor, and artist currently living in Vermont. She is the Managing Director of the Sundog Poetry Center, and has previously taught at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Champlain College, the Vermont Commons School, and the University of Iowa. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA from the University of Vermont. She is the author and illustrator of several books: Walter Benjamin: Reimagined, MIT Press, The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank, Gold Wake Press, Tropicalia, Vagabond Press, Uranian Fruit, Honeybee Press, and Predator/Play, Ethel Zine. She has worked for The Iowa Review, McSweeney’s quarterly, The Believer, and The Lucky Peach. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Poetry Northwest, The Iowa Review, The Green Mountain Review, Vice, Lithub, The Moscow Times, The Examined Life Journal, Gastronomica, Electric Lit, Edible magazine, Mount Island, Fourth Genre, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn.