work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility

The book thus achieves two things that are fully in accord with Benjamin's sense of history: the reader is jolted into interpreting her or his present situation, while at the same time the urgencies of the past come alive.

In this way, the reader is able to circle around and engage with some key Benjaminian notions such as 'aura,' 'distraction,' 'phantasmagoria,' or 'the optical unconscious' in a wide range of examples and contexts ranging from radio journalism to children's picture books. For example, the first part includes both the title essay on the work of art, and also 'The Author as Producer,' while part 4 includes 'News about Flowers' and 'Little History of Photography.' In addition, the editors have expanded each text with generous notes and have written an introductory essay to each section. The title essay in this book is followed by a selection of other thematically grouped writings on many aspects of the relationship between technology, media, and the human sensorium, under titles such as 'The Telephone,' 'Chambermaids,' 'Romances of the Past Century,' or 'Mickey Mouse.' The book also brings together several essays that are well-known but not previously printed together. Then came film and exploded this prison-world' ('The Work of Art,' part 16, p. Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories, seemed to close relentlessly around us. Here, his hope that the development of techniques of mass communication such as film would result in new, critical, and liberated modes of consciousness was most fully explained and enunciated: 'The most important social function of film is to establish equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus.

In Benjamin's extended writing and rewriting of this text between 19, this was his second and most expanded version. By contrast, this volume presents us (under a different title) with a different working of the same argument that was not translated into English until the beginning of this century (in Selected Writings, vol. Indeed, most students in art, design, and cultural history encounter Benjamin's work through reading the essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'-launched on Anglophone readers in the volume titled Illuminations (Hannah Arendt, ed. In my own field of teaching and research, the work of Walter Benjamin is so widely referenced that it could be said he has attained the status of 'patron saint of visual studies,' as characterized by James Elkins in 2003.

Work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility