WALTER BENJAMIN UNPACKING MY LIBRARY SERIES

After carefully filling an ancient presbytery near France’s Loire Valley with a personal library of no fewer than 35,000 volumes, he was compelled to pack them all up again in preparation for a move to a New York apartment.

WALTER BENJAMIN UNPACKING MY LIBRARY SERIES

A captivating tour of the bookshelves of ten leading artists, exploring the intricate connections between reading, artistic practice, and identity Taking its inspiration from Walter Benjamins seminal 1931 essay, the Unpacking My Library series charts a spirited exploration of the reading and book collecting. Manguel had found himself faced with a bookish dilemma that verged on a psychological crisis. By:Jo Steffens,Matthias Neumann Published on by Yale University Press. Manguel, then a teenager, to read aloud to him.) Not long before his appointment, Mr. (In a gesture that now appears fateful, when Borges’s eyesight began to fail he asked Mr. Smithson, Communications Director Emeritus, Princeton University Art Museum. DiBattista, Pro-fessor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair, Commit-tee for Film Studies Trevor Dawes, Circulation Services Director, Firestone Library Dr. In 2015, the widely traveled Argentine writer Alberto Manguel was appointed director of Argentina’s national library, a post once held by Jorge Luis Borges. My sincere thanks to this year’s judges: Maria A. He ruminated about “the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions” and declared that the “acquisition of an old book is its rebirth.” But he also acknowledged the role of serendipity in shaping a library-and a life-as he noted that “the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books.” Benjamin’s statements prompt us to ask: Is a well-stocked library a badge of character or merely a repository of choices and desires? For that matter, what is the rationale for libraries or collections, and how will they retain their integrity while enduring societal and technological changes? Three new books take up this conversation. MY GARAGE IS STUFFED with endless boxes of books. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem. Trev’s Books Unpacking my Grandfather’s Library. Walter Bendix Schnflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. In his 1931 essay “Unpacking My Library,” the German-Jewish author Walter Benjamin wove a spiritual aura around his books as he prepared to shelve them in a new home. Walter Benjamin Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting.

Walter benjamin unpacking my library