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 expose on history (specifically, the disintegration
of culture) as deciphered in the most concrete of its artifacts and
rituals. -- Michael Blum * 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. --
Carolin Duttlinger * Times Literary Supplement *
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