Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was the author of many works of literary and cultural analysis. Michael W. Jennings is Class of 1900 Professor of Modern Languages at Princeton University. Greil Marcus is the author of The Doors, Mystery Train, and other books.
The prose in One-Way Street is positively electrified by the
historical moment…Far more important than any residues of past
literature, however prevalent, are the ways in which One-Way Street
ushers in a wholly original literary aesthetics. Its formal daring
is unmatched by any of Benjamin’s earlier work…One-Way Street is
dead set on a new mode of materialism, one that shares with
Surrealism an esteem for everyday objects, debris, junk, and
dross—for whatever is marginal, marginalized, outmoded, or
fleeting. This edition’s index testifies to the dizzying thematic
diversity of Benjamin’s undertaking: children’s toys, capital
punishment, money, mobs, utopia, fancy goods, misery, souvenirs,
beggars, and red neon advertising signs reflected in pools of dirty
rain. Form in One-Way Street is no mere envelope, but the very
arena in which these objects and phenomena clash and generate their
sparks. Benjamin’s aphorisms mimic the rhythms of the street,
instantiating the experiences most proper to it: distraction,
reverie, shock, haste, detour, etc. Scathing critique is mixed with
imagistic commentary and surrealistic prose poetry—all broken into
shards and scattered like a mosaic of fragments. But however
atomized and heterogeneous, the little pieces of One-Way Street
pursue a common goal: an idiosyncratic exposé on history
(specifically, the disintegration of culture) as deciphered in the
most concrete of its artifacts and rituals.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
One-Way Street is Benjamin’s most daring and experimental book;
though short, it contains a wide range of genres ranging from
aphorisms and political satire to maxims and instructions.
*Times Literary Supplement*
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