The MIT Press Walter Benjamin Reimagined

An illuminated tour of Walter Benjamin's ideas; a graphic translation; an encyclopedia of fragments. Walter Benjamin was a man of letters, an art critic, an essayist, a translator, a philosopher, a collector, and an urban flaneur. In his writings, he ambles, samples, and explores. With Walter Benjamin Reimagined, Frances Cannon offers a visual and literary response to Benjamin's work. With detailed and dreamlike pen-and-ink drawings and hand-lettered text, Cannon gives readers an illuminated tour of Walter Benjamin's thoughts-a graphic translation, an encyclopedia of fragments. Cannon has not created a guide to Benjamin's greatest ideas-this is not an illustrated Walter Benjamin cheat sheet-but rather a beautifully rendered work of graphic literature. Cannon doesn't plod through thickets of minutiae; she strolls-a flaneuse herself-using Benjamin's words and her own drawings to construct a creative topography of Benjamin's writing. Phrases from Unpacking My Library, for example, are accompanied by images of flying papers, stray books, stacked books-books not yet touched by the mild boredom of order -and a bearded mage. Cannon takes the reader through different periods of Benjamin's writing: Artifacts of Youth, nostalgic musings on his childhood; Fragments of a Critical Eye, early writings, political observations, and cultural criticism; Athenaeum of Imagination, meditations on philosophy and psychology; A Stroll through the Arcades, Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus; and A Collection of Dreams and Stories, experimental and fantastical writings. With drawings and text, Cannon offers a phantasmagorical tribute to Benjamin's wandering eye.