Walter Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art” essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on media and on culture in general—in their most realized form, while retaining an edge that gets under the skin of everyone who reads it. In this essay the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought. This essay, however, is only t...(展开全部)

The Bureaucracy of Beauty is a wide-ranging work of cultural theory that connects literary studies, postcoloniality, the history of architecture and design, and the history and present of empire. Professor Ananya Roy of UC Berkeley calls it a "fantastic book," and in many ways this is the best description of it. The Bureaucracy of Beauty begins with nineteenth-century Britain's...(展开全部)

One of the most important works of cultural theory ever written, Walter Benjamin's groundbreaking essay explores how the age of mass media means audiences can listen to or see a work of art repeatedly – and what the troubling social and political implications of this are. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and...(展开全部)

This edition includes, in addition to the most pertinent sections of The Fable’s two volumes, a selection from Mandeville’s An Enquiry into the Origin of Honor and selections from two of Mandeville’s most important sources: Pierre Bayle and the Jansenist Pierre Nicole. Hundert’s Introduction places Mandeville in a number of eighteenth-century debates—particularly that of the na...(展开全部)

“The articles and columns in The Scandal of the Century demonstrate that his forthright, lightly ironical voice just seemed to be there, right from the start. . . . He’s among those rare great fiction writers whose ancillary work is almost always worth finding. . . . He had a way of connecting the souls in all his writing, fiction and nonfiction, to the melancholy static of the...(展开全部)

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most influential thinkers of the past 150 years and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) is his most important work on ethics and politics. A polemical contribution to moral and political theory, it offers a critique of moral values and traces the historical evolution of concepts such as guilt, conscience, responsibility, law and justice. This i...(展开全部)

Wolfgang Ernst has demonstrated that the knowledge of time-giving ('chrono-poetical') media and their temporal essence enriches the tradition of philosophical inquiry into the nature of 'time'. This book, a translated and abridged edition of Ernst's two major volumes, Chronopoetik and Gleichursprunglichkeit, undertakes this on three levels: a close analysis of time-critical mom...(展开全部)