/lit/ - Literature

A year or two ago somebody asked for a more in-depth reading order, so here's that reposted:

"A Little History of Photography"
"The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility"
"Chaplin" / "Chaplin in Retrospect"
"The Storyteller"
"The Image of Proust"
"The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire"
"Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”
"Unpacking My Library"
"Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian"
From "Arcades Project" - Convolute H - "The Collector", & Convolute I - "The Interior, The Trace"
"On Some Motifs in Baudelaire"
From "Arcades Project" - Convolute D - "Boredom, Eternal Return"
"Central Park"
"Theses on the Philosophy of History"

Suggested (but not essential) background knowledge before digging in:
Proust
Kant
Nietzsche
Kierkegaard's "Repetition"
Some basic Freud

Heavily recommended background:
Lukac's "History and Class Consciousness"
Marx, particularly Commodity Fetishism (though you should know this already) and the 18th Brumaire
Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil and the "Painter of Modern Life"
Kafka's general work

Biography:
Biography of a Friendship by Gershom Scholem
Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life by Howard Eiland & Michael Jennings

Scholarship:
Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History by Michael Löwy
Inheriting Walter Benjamin by Gerhard Richter
The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time By Peter Fenves
Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the city by Graeme Gilloch
Walter Benjamin: or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism by Terry Eagleton
Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of tradition by John McCole
Benjamin's -abilities by Samuel Weber
Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism by Esther Leslie

>>14717239
The internet has made me all of the youth of the West and East profoundly sick, and the worst thing is that we can't do anything about this latent addiction either without the world coming to a halt. Pre-internet culture feels as its been centuries past, and with the speed that culture travels through the world nowadays, there is none, no more movements since the stock of everything rises and falls in an instant, nothing.

Huxley could not have thought of such a narcotic for life in his wildest dreams

>>12714090
>benjamin
Go about this order vaguely, generally progresses in term of difficulty / assumption of knowledge (you've read Capital vol 1 and know a thing or two about dialectics right?):
"A Little History of Photography"
"The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility"
"Chaplin" / "Chaplin in Retrospect"
"The Storyteller"
"The Image of Proust"
"The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire"
"Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”
"Unpacking My Library"
"Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian"
From "Arcades Project" - Convolute H - "The Collector", & Convolute I - "The Interior, The Trace"
"On Some Motifs in Baudelaire"
From "Arcades Project" - Convolute D - "Boredom, Eternal Return"
"Central Park"
"Theses on the Philosophy of History"

>>12725142
>I don't know what you're talking about mate, Benjamin is read in pretty much every humanities course
Yeah, but he's largely misunderstood (at least from my experience). Like most students think Aura is a *good* thing and is equivalent to just nostalgia.
>you'll probably need to do a whole major dedicated to understanding every nuance of Benji's autism
I'm doin my thesis on him, and this is absolutely true. Even now, although I feel like I have a damn good grasp on what he's doing / was trying to do, I'm still missing out on a ton of nuance because I'm not super comfortable with Kant, and my lack of experience with Goethe. But, frankly, if you're a contemporary leftist and you're not spending a lot your theory time trying to read Benji you're doing yourself and the world a huge disservice.