by Ivor Indyk
© all rights reserved
“The critic and the public culture” – there is a redundancy in the title which requires some explanation. The terms “public” and “culture” seem virtually synonymous to us. For what is the “public” realm, if it is not the common practices and values which we call, collectively, “culture”? And what is “culture”, if it is not a common possession, and therefore, fundamentally, public?
Nevertheless, if “public culture” doesn’t seem like a redundant description, at least not at the present time, that is because it has now become common to annex the word “culture” to the word “corporate”, and to talk of two cultures: corporate culture, and that territory which it has all but usurped, and which we now call, for want of a better phrase, and with a quiet note of pathos or desperation, the “public culture”.
For the literary critic, this situation is likely to be felt with particular keenness, because he or she stands, hemmed in, between two corporate worlds, the publishing and media industries on the one hand, the university on the other. For the university, which in the past offered a space which one thought of as belonging to the public culture, has now fallen hostage to the imperatives of the corporate culture. The most obvious sign of this is the university’s active discouragement of public critical activity. No recognition for reviews, for essays in anything other than refereed journals, for newspaper or magazine articles, for contributions to public debate on radio, television or other public fora, for editing or publishing other writers’ work.
It has often been said that Australia lacks the media to satisfy the critic’s need to communicate with a larger public. Having sought to provide such a medium, in HEAT, I think it would be truer to say that, by and large, critics no longer feel the need to communicate with a larger public. The needs imposed on them by the corporate world in which they must now make their way are far more compelling than those which might call in the name of community, or public responsibility.
I take a literary critic to be someone vitally concerned with the reading of literature. Most critics are to be found in universities, because they have to make a living, or hope to make a living, by teaching. Teaching is a public activity, a contribution to the public culture however much it might be hedged by corporate economies, and the corporate criteria of assessable aims and outcomes. But it is, necessarily, confined in its reach; and it is offered as an increasingly expensive privilege.
I am concerned here with the kind of criticism which is available in a public way – which is accessible, reproducible, interesting and with what we might call “reach” – it has the potential to exercise an appeal beyond its immediately specified audience. The technology exists, or will soon exist, to give this kind of criticism great power. But the corporate mentality requires immediate returns, returns which are statistically verifiable, not virtual – student numbers, grant dollars, staff-student ratios – it needs to be able to count. So this power goes unrecognised.
It’s unnecessary to go through the familiar litany of complaints about the ways in which the university restricts the public role of the critic. But I would like to single out three forms of restriction, in particular, the influence of which is now very apparent.
The first is the way the university now structures research activity in terms of the pursuit of large grants. Literary projects framed for large grants are expensive by definition: they favour the bureaucratic over the speculative intellect simply by virtue of the degree of management involved. Such projects are also large by definition: they do not encourage the kind of topical activity, the essayistic intervention, the readiness to comment, which is typical of public criticism. In them, the researcher is primarily responsible to the corporation rather than to the public, and it is easy to see why this should be so: since “large grants” are chief amongst the university’s indicators of productivity and performance, and other forms of funding are tied to them, the university stands to gain more from them than does the individual researcher. They are, first and foremost, a means of generating corporate income.
The second problem is the requirement placed on the use of institutionally appropriate discourse, of the kind which will carry authority within or across disciplinary boundaries in the university system. Though it has authority within the university, the language of academic discourse has very little without it, and is not intended to. Viewed from the public realm, the terms of such a language seem set in concrete, limiting its accessibility and reach – from this perspective, it seems unnecessarily concerned with authority, since it has none. It appears alternately obscure, and comical.
The third problem is the way a whole generation of young literary critics is being trained for positions in the academy which don’t exist, because the indices which govern the institution’s income demand a high intake of postgraduates. To be funded to read, and to write about reading, is a wonderful training opportunity for a future in criticism – but if the future will not, for most, be in the university itself, why do we continue to train our critics in a language, a method, a focus, which will not equip them to operate where they are needed most, in the largely undermanned “public” realm?
The sequestration of criticism in our own period is the more marked if one thinks of the public role played in Australia by an earlier generation of critics, like Judith Wright, James McAuley, A.D. Hope, Vincent Buckley, or before them, Vance and Nettie Palmer and A.A. Phillips. Since the university was then only beginning to exercise an interest in Australian literature, it acted as a base from which the critic might write for the educated public at large, rather than as the exclusive and self-absorbed domain it has since become. The fact that so many of these critics were also poets or novelists in their own right enhanced their authority, though it would be unlikely to do so today.
Given the seriousness of the situation, I would like to focus on a figure outside our own immediate tradition, one who, by virtue of the supreme value he placed on the role of the critic, and his dedication to this role in a time of crisis, tells us much about the qualities necessary for a renewed public criticism in Australia. I mean the German literary critic Walter Benjamin, whose enormously influential writing came out of the brief period between the two World Wars, ending with his death in 1940, as he was fleeing from the Nazis.
The immediate appeal of Benjamin’s work lies partly in the extraordinary sharpness of his critical perceptions, always an essential public attribute; partly in the trajectory his criticism took, from the reading of Goethe to the reading of the streets of Paris; and partly also because his rejection by the academy – he was denied his doctorate for The Origin of German Tragic Drama, one of the great critical documents of the twentieth century – was instrumental in the development of his role as both a public critic, and a critic reading the public realm. The image which has now become so well known, of Benjamin on the day before his suicide, perched on a mountainside above the border between France and Spain, clinging to a heavy black briefcase containing a recently completed manuscript, captures in an extreme form the precariousness, and risk, which is a feature of criticism practised outside the secure confines of the academy. Yet there is in Benjamin’s critical writing, for all the darkness that he saw about him, and the sombre qualities of his own outlook, a lightness of touch, and a joyful lyrical quality. This lyricism has been all but banished from our own critical discourse, which is earnest, and keen to assert its theoretical credentials.
More fundamentally, what is remarkable about Benjamin’s criticism, in a period of cultural disintegration, is the assurance it gives that every text worthy of interpretation, every detail and every object, has in it some intimation of a larger unity to which it belongs, and of which it is an expression. In the first place, Benjamin seems to have drawn on two complementary sources for this assurance, German romanticism, and Jewish mysticism. Certainly his early formulations were idealistic, and mystical in character. In his early essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”, this totality is the name, the divine creative power of the word, inherent in all languages, and in the mute communication of all things. Language is the medium of creation, set free in man, who by naming, in turn translates the nameless language of things. Regardless of what we now think of its metaphysical underpinning, the perspective allows Benjamin to assert “the material community of things in their communication”, to see communication, and therefore community as fundamental qualities of the world.
A few years later, in his 1925 essay on Naples, it is a primitive folk energy, a “rich barbarism”, which communicates itself in his description of the city, animating its spaces, overflowing its boundaries, empowering its inhabitants, charging its ordinary objects with mystery, so that not just the crowds in the streets, the food in the markets, but iced drinks and toothpaste, rubber balls and chocolate, fans and fireworks become possessed of magical properties. Benjamin calls this animation of the detail, this sense of the whole working in the part, porosity.In his subsequent essays on Moscow (1927) and Marseilles(1929) there is a similar kind of communication or flaring out of energy, constricted and frozen in the case of Moscow by State control, but reasserting itself wherever the folk traditions continue to find expression, as in the old pictorial shop signs in Moscow for example, which Benjamin reads like images in a poem, “shoes falling out of a basket, a Pomeranian running away with a sandal in his mouth. Pendants before the entrance to a Turkish kitchen; gentlemen, each with a fez adorning his head and each at his own little table…Often Moscow’s evening sky glows in a frightening blue: one has unwittingly looked at it through one of the gigantic pairs of blue spectacles that project from optician’s shops like signposts.” In Marseilles the enchantment is felt in the bustle by the port, particularly in the shellfish and oyster stalls, as the shells are “sieved, grouped, counted, cracked open, thrown away”, to be resurrected, on the opposite quay, as souvenirs, “the mineral hereafter of seashells”, alongside inkpots and anchors, steamers and thermometers. “The pressure of a thousand atmospheres under which this world of images writhes, rears, piles up,” Benjamin writes, “is the same force that is tested in the hard hands of seamen, after long voyages, on the thighs and breasts of women; and the lust that, on the shell-covered caskets, presses from the mineral world a red or blue velvet heart to be pierced with needles and brooches is the same lust that sends tremors through these streets on paydays.”
The clear sense you get is that Benjamin is deliberately driving his interpretative skills as a critic into the public arena, and into that arena in which the public manifested itself in its most concentrated form, the streets and markets of the modern city. The essay on Marseilles begins with a quote from Breton, “the street…the only valid field of experience”. The essay on Naples is dedicated to the Latvian Communist Asja Lacis, who had a strong influence on the social turn that Benjamin’s thought took in the late 1920s. Perhaps inevitably, given the idealist perspective from which he comes, as a critic, the city first presents itself as a site of primitive energies. Yet that cannot be the only explanation, since Benjamin’s readings constantly vacillate between these two extreme promises of unity, the metaphysical on the one hand, the primitive on the other, in his interpretations of Goethe or Proust or Kafka, no less than in his readings of the city street.
The text which most fully demonstrates the new social orientation in Benjamin’s writing is the long essay “One Way Street”, which he published in 1928. It seems remarkably ahead of its time. In it Benjamin reads his way along an imaginary street, stringing his meditations from the hooks provided by its apartments, shop fronts, displayed commodities, signs, graffiti and advertisements. The first stop, “Filling Station” contains this announcement:
The construction of life is at present in the power far more of facts than of convictions, and of such facts as have scarcely ever become the basis of convictions. Under these circumstances, true literary activity cannot aspire to take place within a literary framework; this is, rather, the habitual expression of its sterility. Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book – in leaflets, brochures, articles and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment. Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
It is typical of Benjamin that he should go for the spindles and joints, the small details on which the operation of the whole depends. He notes approvingly elsewhere how, in Proust, “remembrance progresses from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier”. The movement is similar to that which Benjamin inherits from Romanticism and Jewish mysticism, both of which dwell in the ruin, the fragment, stressing the limitations of the object, its incompleteness, in order to return it to the totality from which it draws its significance.
In “One Way Street” some of the objects, those from which the life has fled, or the manufactured objects accumulated by the bourgeoisie, which never had life, do not answer to the interpreter’s gaze – “the luxury goods swaggering before us now parade such brazen solidity that all the mind’s shafts break harmlessly on their surface.” Others, like the objects which the child transforms in play, or those which have the magic of tradition or fairy-tale about them, open onto larger worlds. There is a remarkable description of a shooting range, where the striking of the bull’s-eye triggers the unfolding of a mechanical tableau. Hence the large door with its target: “if you have hit the mark it opens, and before red plush curtains stands a Moor who seems to bow slightly. He holds a golden bowl before him. On it lie three pieces of fruit. The first opens; a tiny person stands inside it and bows. In the second, two equally diminutive puppets revolve in a dance. (The third did not open.)”
These little narratives, these worlds that open within worlds, are not accidental. Benjamin particularly valued the qualities of “tact” and “politeness”, as the qualities appropriate to a critic who would do justice to the significance, the intimations of totality, present in ordinary things. Tact, he defined in an essay on the great Austrian critic Karl Kraus, as a kind of “moral alertness”, “the capacity to treat social relationships…as natural, even paradise relationships, and so not only to approach the king as if he had been born with the crown on his brow, but the lackey like an Adam in livery.” The same respect was to be given to plants, to animals, to children. Politeness is another form of tact, important both because it is itself the appearance of grace and dignity in the ordinary actions of an individual, and because it is an attitude of “alert openness” to the humble, the comic, the extreme, the unexpected. (Alertness is very close to that attitude of “astonishment” which Benjamin would later claim as the appropriate response to the work of Kafka or Brecht.)
There is an interesting gloss on “politeness” in the essay “Hashish in Marseilles”, which describes how Benjamin, after smoking hashish, succumbed to hunger, which required a visit to Basso’s restaurant. Here he ordered oysters from the menu, and a local dish as a main course. The waiter returned to say that his choice of main course was unavailable, and offered him the menu a second time. Benjamin’s finger hovers over the previously chosen dish, then settles on the dish directly above it, which he orders. Then he orders the dish above that one, and the next dish, and the next, all the way to the top of the menu. “This was not just from greed, however,” Benjamin comments, “but from an extreme politeness toward the dishes, which I did not wish to offend by a refusal.” The tiny person who stands inside the first piece of fruit and bows is an expression of this politeness; the two puppets revolving in a dance in the second fruit, an expression of that dance of significance, that unity which is felt, appropriately but with astonishment, in the most unexpected places. The third fruit did not open, testifying to the unreliability of the world, the spots in it which refuse to respond, or have no life.
Here the critic’s gaze evokes a response in the object. As Benjamin puts it in his essay on “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism”, the interpreter calls the object “into wakefulness”. This responsive quality in the object, this coming alive, is what Benjamin in his later work on photography will call its “aura”. Given his original standpoint in idealism, his insistence on the divine impress carried by the fragment, his constant reference to this as “semblance” (“Schein” in German),a kind of flaring out of illumination or radiance, we could think of aura as some kind of spiritual emanation. Alternatively, in view of his use of the concept of “porosity”, to describe the way primitive energies express themselves through actions and objects, we might think of it as a chthonic force or power. (The effect is similar to the electricities that break out through Prichard’s characters and landscapes.) But neither is the case. The concept of aura, which is articulated at quite a late stage in Benjamin’s work, marks out a middle ground between the metaphysical and the primitive, a ground which is fundamentally social and historical. In his essay “Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, published in 1939, he describes it thus:
…looking at someone carries the implicit expectation that our look will be returned by the object of our gaze. Where this expectation is met…there is an experience of the aura to the fullest extent. Experience of the aura [in objects] thus rests on the transposition of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
This seems to echo Benjamin’s vision in “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”, of a world in which everything is in communication, each expressing itself in its own language which is in turn a manifestation of pure language, the Divine Word. But there is no transcendental origin in this later formation, which is based on the communication between two human beings, and is therefore fundamentally social. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Benjamin defines the aura of a work of art as an expression of “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”. Distance is essential to this experience of aura: the object addresses the interpreter from its own time, and out of its own time. Yet this time isn’t fixed. The temporal existence expressed in the aura of an object, is “all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced”. The communication that takes place in the auratic moment is one between the present and the past as embodied in the object, but this past is itself dynamic, an accumulation of present moments, including the present in which the object is now observed. Our term for this historical process, in which the past is continually made present through our objects, is of course “tradition”. The aura of an object is a kind of patina, a coating, a weaving of the accretions of significance with which it is endowed as an agent of tradition. As Benjamin says of the art object, its uniqueness, which is to say, its aura, “is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition”. Mechanical reproduction threatens to detach the reproduced object “from the domain of tradition”, by bringing it wholly into our own time without at the same time bringing the associations it has gathered in the course of its history.
Significantly, Benjamin’s notion of “aura” corresponds exactly to his understanding of the task of the literary critic, as defined in “Literary History and the Study of Literature”: this is to be aware of the literary work’s entire life and effects, its fate, its reception, its translations, its fame. “For with this the work is transformed inwardly into a microcosm, or indeed a microeon. What is at stake is not to portray literary works in the context of their age, but to represent the age that perceives them – our age – in the age during which they arose.” It is this reciprocity and return of recognition, across the distance of time, which turns literature, according to Benjamin, into “an organon of history” – which is to say, into an agent of tradition.
And yet… What Benjamin experienced during the period in which he lived was a crisis in tradition. The auratic moments of communication with the past which he describes are sporadic and fugitive in their operation. They flash out, fleetingly, and then sink back into the stream of things. False and demonic appearances of aura (as for example in the Nazi invocations of tradition) abound. Some of the contemporary artists whom Benjamin most admires, Loos and Le Corbusier in architecture, Atget in photography, Brecht in the drama, are concerned to drive out the intimations of aura, to start afresh with few resources. “The most urgent task of the present-day writer,” Benjamin wrote in 1934 in “The Author as Producer”, “is to recognize how poor he is and how poor he has to be in order to begin again from the beginning.”
Others, like Kafka and Proust, meet tradition as something grown strange or pathological, or substitute in its absence the personal disciplines of memory. It’s significant, I think, that whenever Benjamin tries to convey the sense of aura, this intimate communication between past and present in tradition, it is always as an isolated, paradisal moment, a moment of pastoral fulfilment. “While at rest on a summer’s noon,” is how the famous formulation goes, “to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour become part of their appearance – this is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that branch.” But of course the reality was quite different. As Benjamin argued in his 1933 essay “Experience and Poverty”, the First World War had set tradition at nought. “A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its centre, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.” It was in this spirit that he saw in the early version of Mickey Mouse, a figure similar to the characters of Kafka. “Mickey Mouse proves,” he wrote with heavy irony, and a small measure of hope, in 1931, “that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being.” The kind of world in which he found himself, increasingly, was a world in which things did not return the look of human recognition. The life of tradition had withdrawn from them, leaving them empty, like ruins, in its wake.
This is the world which Benjamin sought to articulate in the work which so offended the representatives of the academic establishment in 1925, The Origin of German Tragic Drama.Instead of a living tradition, in these dramas, Benjamin wrote, “the word ‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience”. Instead of aura, what they offer to the gaze of the interpreter, is allegory. For the distinguishing feature of the allegorical object is that it no longer has a life of its own. Only in this way, can it be taken to stand for something else. Even here, Benjamin finds hope. For if the object, dead to itself, can be taken to mean something else, then it still lies within the power of the interpreter to give it significance, however schematic, however arbitrary. This is the consolation offered to a gaze which must remain, however, melancholy and alienated. Or worse. Since the allegorical attribution is more or less arbitrary, the object itself alternates between the ostentation of its allegorical appearance, and the disconsolate character of its everyday appearance as a ruin or a corpse. The gaze of the interpreter also swings between fascination and disappointment, as the object he recovers allegorically, he must abandon after its exhaustion. This compulsive taking up and discarding of objects, in the yearning for significance, Benjamin likens to the behaviour of an ape. And there is more. In an insight which Benjamin must have seen borne out in the allegorical posturings of the Nazis, he notes that “evil…exists only in allegory, is nothing other than allegory, and means something other than what it is. It means precisely the non-existence of what it presents.”
I have been using Benjamin himself – or rather, his writings – in an auratic fashion, because they have a lot to say that is relevant now in defining the interpretive stance appropriate to a critic operating in, and on, the public culture. Of course, though I began by noting how that culture is under threat in Australia, it is in no way as threatened as the culture whose decline Benjamin witnessed. Nevertheless, his perceptions, born of an intense engagement which perhaps only a sense of crisis can bring, are of great relevance to our own situation.
I’m thinking not only of his commitment, as a critic, to understanding the threatening complexities of his time, though this is an important consideration. He never surrendered that magical sense of reciprocity and recognition between human beings, and between human beings and their world, which informs his work from the beginning, though his determination to mould it to the exigencies of his time, and specifically to the service of dialectical materialism, must have seemed at times, and certainly to some of his friends, to go against his natural inclinations. One of the most remarkable aspects of his work is the way he was able to transform the notion of aura, which had its roots in idealism, and mysticism, into a political understanding of the distancing effect at work in Brecht’s epic theatre. Brecht’s habit of interrupting or punctuating the action gave his plays a gestural quality: in that moment, in which the gesture was held, what became apparent, as though by a stroke of lightning, were the material conditions that gave the gesture its meaning. The proper reaction in the audience was one of astonishment, born of recognition. The terminology is very similar to that Benjamin used to describe the moment of reciprocal recognition in the aura, only now it is not tradition which provides the ground for it, but the dialectical view of history as a struggle for control of the means of production. In his famous formulation: “The conditions which Epic theatre reveals is the dialectic at a standstill.” But in all other respects, the stance, the vocabulary, the moment of recognition, the attitude is a familiar one. “Epic theatre makes life spurt up high from the bed of time and, for an instant, hover iridescent in empty space. Then it puts it back to bed.”
It is not this note, though, that I want to end on. What is most compelling for me about Benjamin is his timeliness, his almost palpable sense of time, which can only come from being thoroughly immersed in time. More than any other thinker I know, he felt time as a medium, a texture, the way it warps and folds back on itself, flows or congeals, inhibits action or gives it grace. He once wrote that the best visual equivalent of the aura was to be found in Van Gogh’s late paintings, by which he meant not simply the halo which surrounds his objects, but the coarse weave of Van Gogh’s brushstrokes, the wrinkledeffect which it gives to his objects. Benjamin was particularly sensitive to the strange deformations wrought by tradition as it faltered or flared out under the pressure of time, particularly conscious of what could be called the pathologies of time. This is most obvious in his interpretations of Kafka, the way, as he notes, the threatening force of the future is felt in Kafka’s work as a distortion of the present, so that he is incapable of portraying any event without distortion; the way, again, the present is slowed down by the terrible weight of an uninformed past, especially apparent in Kafka’s figures of authority, who seem to wake from a vegetative existence, and act out of a deep sense of exhaustion, as if they lived in the time of cosmic epochs, had eons to move, displacing the sheer mass of dead time in every gesture they made. In another essay, Benjamin presented time as a whirlpool, “in which earlier and later events, the prehistory and posthistory of an event swirl”. Of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, with its combination of aging and remembrance, he spoke of time as a braid, an intertwining. In Julien Green, he noted how the work would suddenly fall, in its treatment of family history, into the deep recesses of primal history, as if a corridor had suddenly opened in time. Of Hofmannsthal he wrote: “The country no longer had a future. And so…the time that was yet to come was, as it were, all rolled up into the past, like a scroll, and became a sort of underworld of the future, one haunted by only the oldest of things.”
These irruptions of the primeval into the present seem to me particularly characteristic of Australian literature, though the warpings of tradition which they represent exist there for different reasons to those Benjamin saw in the literature and objects of his own period. The vacillation between the metaphysical and the primitive, so dominant in Benjamin, is likewise, one of the basic reflexes of our culture. So too is that other, fundamental, set of polarities by which Benjamin sought to define the power, and the pathology, of tradition, the movement between aura and allegory, in the critic’s mode of apprehension. It is this movement between the auratic and the allegorical, often in the same work, which is one of the most powerful characteristics of Australian writing, binding authors like Slessor or Prichard, Murray or Kefala or Mudrooroo, whom we would normally put in different if not in opposing camps.
There has been much talk, in Australian criticism, about the sense of place in Australia, and the mapping of its spaces. But what these polarities – the oscillation between aura and allegory, the metaphysical and the primitive – point to, is the extremely tenuous hold that tradition has here. Australia is a country with many histories, many of them suppressed or only partially told, existing side by side or overlaid, operating according to radically different scales of time. Time for us, too, is wrinkled and folded, and pierced with discontinuities. It is time, not space, which is the really difficult problem in Australia; and it is timeliness, not just as a willingness to act, but as the ability to position oneself, that is the quality we need most in our critics.
Ivor Indyk is the founding editor of the literary journal HEAT. A critic, essayist and reviewer, he has written a monograph on David Malouf, published by Oxford University Press in 1993, and essays on many aspects of Australian literature. He lectures on English and Australian literature at the University of Sydney.
Bibliographical Note
The section of this essay devoted to Walter Benjamin could not have been written without the two-volume Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, published by Belknap/Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass and London, 1999). Volume 1 covers the period 1913-1926, Volume 2 1927-1934. I have drawn on the following essays collected in the Selected Writings(the sources are given by volume and page number, with specific citations in parentheses): “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”, I, 62-74 (pp.73-74); “Naples”, I,414-421; “Moscow”, II, 22-46 (p.39); “Marseilles”, II, 232-236(pp.234-35); “One Way Street“, I, 444-48(pp.444,454,473); “Karl Kraus”, II, 433-458 (pp.436-37); “Ibizan Sequence”, II, 587-594 (pp.587-88); “Hashish in Marseilles”, II,673-79 (p.676); “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism”, I,116-200 (p.147); “Literary History and the Study of Literature”, II, 459-465 (p.464); “The Author as Producer”, II, 768-782 (p.776); “Little History of Photography”, II, 507-530 (pp.518-19); “Experience and Poverty”, II, 731-36 (p.732); “MickeyMouse”, II, 545-46 (p.545); “On the Image of Proust”,II, 237-47 (p.244); “Julien Green”, II, 331-36 (p.335);”Theological Criticism”, II, 428-32 (p.429).
Reference is also made to the following works of Walter Benjamin: “Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London & New York: Verso, 1989), pp.147-48; “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp.220-21; The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London & New York: Verso, 1998), pp.177,185,233; “What is Epic Theatre?” in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: NLB, 1977), pp.12-13; “Franz Kafka”, in Illuminations, pp.111-40.