Walter
Benjamin is one of the most famous thinkers and writers
of the twentieth century. But he is least famous for what
is, arguably, his greatest work, a study of the material
remains of nineteenth-century Paris.
In the multi-media essays that we have made—part
of a class at the Bard Graduate Center in Spring 2002—we
interpret and illuminate that history by making it speak
to the present, as Benjamin believed all history should.
We use his early twentieth-century guide to mid nineteenth-century
Paris, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, to make
sense of the New York of the second half of the twentieth.
This is an application of the technology of digital storytelling
to advanced textual exegesis, an experiment in fusing
form and content.
Walter
Benjamin is one of the most famous thinkers and writers
of the twentieth century. But he is least famous for what
is, arguably, his greatest work, a study of the material
remains of nineteenth-century Paris.
