Kirjahaku

Esther Leslie's path-breaking study of Walter Benjamin is unlike any other book presently available in English on Benjamin, in seeking to make a case for a more politicised reading of Benjamin's oeuvre. In looking at the entirety of Benjamin's work - rather than the four or five essays available in English which tend to form the Benjamin 'canon' - Leslie offers powerful new insights into a key twentieth-century political thinker, correcting the post-structuralist bias that has characterised so much Benjamin scholarship, and repositioning Benjamin's work in its historical and political context. In her examination of Benjamin's commentary on the politics and aesthetics of technology - from Benjamin's work on nineteenth-century industrial culture to his analyses of the Nazi deployment of the bomber - Esther Leslie re-contextualises Benjamin's writings in a lucid and cogently argued new study.

Esther Leslie's path-breaking study of Walter Benjamin is unlike any other book presently available in English on Benjamin, in seeking to make a case for a more politicised reading of Benjamin's oeuvre. In looking at the entirety of Benjamin's work - rather than the four or five essays available in English which tend to form the Benjamin 'canon' - Leslie offers powerful new insights into a key twentieth-century political thinker, correcting the post-structuralist bias that has characterised so much Benjamin scholarship, and repositioning Benjamin's work in its historical and political context. In her examination of Benjamin's commentary on the politics and aesthetics of technology - from Benjamin's work on nineteenth-century industrial culture to his analyses of the Nazi deployment of the bomber - Esther Leslie recontextualises Benjamin's writings in a lucid and cogently argued new study.

Liquid crystal is a curious phase of matter. It has the ability at once to flow, like water, and to refract, like ice. It was closely observed, if not yet named, by experts in 1888 but they found no practical use for it. Probed and imaged for decades, its polar properties were eventually harnessed for an age of screen-based media. Now liquid crystal is ubiquitous, communicating, selling and delighting, in flat-screen LCDs, computers and mobile devices. We also now know that it exists inside our bodies.For the very first time, Liquid Crystals tells the history of this anomalous and little understood phase of matter in relation to a ‘liquid crystal’ epoch, spanning from 1820 to today, detailing the key interminglings of the liquid and crystalline located in politics, philosophy and art during this time. There are insightful and remarkable readings of cultural forms from Romantic landscape painting to snow globes, from mountain films to Hollywood eco-disaster movies, from touchscreen devices to DNA, cold wars and political thaws, media meltdowns and ice in the desert. Expertly written in an accessible style, Liquid Crystals recounts the unheralded but hugely significant emergence and applications of this unique matter.

With ruminations on drawing, colour and caricature, on the political meaning of fairy-tales, talking animals and human beings as machines, Hollywood Flatlands brings to light the links between animation, avant-garde art and modernist criticism.Focusing on the work of aesthetic and political revolutionaries of the inter-war period, Esther Leslie reveals how the animation of commodities can be studied as a journey into modernity in cinema. She looks afresh at the links between the Soviet Constructivists and the Bauhaus, for instance, and those between Walter Benjamin and cinematic abstraction. She also provides new interpretations of the writings of Siegfried Kracauer on animation, shows how Theodor Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's film viewing affected their intellectual development, and reconsiders Sergei Eisenstein's famous handshake with Mickey Mouse at Disney's Hyperion Studios in 1930.

Walter Benjamin, critic, essayist, translator, philosopher - one of the twentieth century’s most influential intellectuals - continues to intrigue today. His work stimulates a profusion of responses in the form of new novels, operas, films and artworks, as well as a never-abating production of academic texts. In this new biography, the first to be written in over a decade, author Esther Leslie uses the recently published entirety of Benjamin's correspondence, drawing on his numerous diaries and autobiographical works, in order to provide a careful account of his circumstances and thoughts.Benjamin had many interests: he cherished childhood and its trappings; had a passion for the displacement and novelty of travel; toys; cities; trick-books; and ships; all are given due attention as the author weaves Benjamin's wayward apperceptions into the narrative of a life lived. She follows Benjamin as he travels from Berlin to Capri, Ibiza, Riga, Moscow, Paris, and finally the Spanish border where he died in 1940. The author acknowledges Benjamin’s thesis that personal histories can be traced only in the context of social milieus, economic forces, technological shifts, and historical events, and seamlessly interweaves biographical details with an accessible yet concentrated account of Benjamin's intellectual development, drawing a colourful portrait of a capacious intellect trapped in increasingly hostile circumstances.Leslie’s meticulous attention to Benjamin’s political, intellectual, geographical and cultural journeying challenges the populist depiction of the intellectual as a tragic and lonely figure. Walter Benjamin restores its subject to his proper place as an artistic combatant and a man desirous of and relishing experience.

This book provides a history of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), a large Britain- based chemical firm which was a major industrial player in the twentieth century. Once a model for Britain’s industrial reach and dominance, ICI collapsed in the mid-2000s, with some still profitable elements sold off to other chemical firms. The book focuses on the firm’s origin site in the Northeast of England, around Middlesbrough, engaging the remnants of the company magazine, oral histories and social media posts, and material artifacts in the world, to relate a history of the social, environmental, cultural and imaginative and bodily impact of the presence (and then absence) of ICI. This unique work is open to coincidence and speculation, drawing on science fictional and urban myth narratives which emanate from the area. Through the lens of global narratives of industrial and philosophical innovation, it inquires into uncommon and diverse themes, such as the manufacture of Quorn, the place of photographic mediation of the factory, and industrial disease. Setting out from a context of heavy industry and material processing, the book seeks to stimulate poetic and creative thinking around the ways in which people’s lives were enmeshed with synthetic chemicals and the dreams that seemed to ooze and seep from them as by-products.

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.

An investigation of the cultures and technologies of early radio and how a generation of cultural operators--with Schoen at the center--addressed crisis and adversity. Dials, knobs, microphones, clocks; heads, hands, breath, voices. Ernst Schoen joined Frankfurt Radio in the 1920s as programmer and accelerated the potentials of this collision of bodies and technologies. As with others of his generation, Schoen experienced crisis after crisis, from the violence of war, the suicide of friends, economic collapse, and a brief episode of permitted experimentalism under the Weimar Republic for those who would foster aesthetic, technical, and political revolution. The counterreaction was Nazism--and Schoen and his milieux fell victim to it, found ways out of it, or hit against it with all their might. Dissonant Waves tracks the life of Ernst Schoen--poet, composer, radio programmer, theorist, and best friend of Walter Benjamin from childhood--as he moves between Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, and London. It casts radio history and practice into concrete spaces, into networks of friends and institutions, into political exigencies and domestic plights, and into broader aesthetic discussions of the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics. Through friendship and comradeship, a position in state-backed radio, imprisonment, exile, networking in a new country, re-emigration, ill-treatment, neglect, Schoen suffers the century and articulates its broken promises. An exploration of the ripples of radio waves, the circuits of experimentation and friendship, and the proposals that half-found a route into the world--and might yet spark political-technical experimentation.