ENGL 72.15 Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project: Reading Nineteenth-Century Material Culture

Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project is a vast compendium of textual fragments that recreates the phantasmagoria of nineteenth century Paris and the figures who inhabited it: the flâneur, the ragpicker, the poet, the prostitute, the revolutionary, the gambler, and the collector. Moving from sewers and catacombs to department stores and covered arcades, it explores the most innocuous aspects of everyday life in order to excavate high capitalism’s deepest and most resonant dreams about itself. In this course we will contextualize The Arcades Project in the development of Benjamin’s thought more generally, and read it alongside a range of representative nineteenth-century writers such as Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Karl Marx, Heinrich Heine, Charles Baudelaire, Mary Braddon, Émile Zola and others, the better to understand it as a radically experimental form of cultural theory and creative practice. Additional reading in critical theory will include essays by Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Susan Buck-Morss and Carole Pateman.

Junior Colloquium: Course Group II and Course Group IV

Degree Requirement Attributes

Dist:LIT; WCult:W

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Department-Specific Course Categories

English and Creative Writing