Walter Benjamin Reimagined

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 "e;Unpacking My Library,"e; for example, are accompanied by images of flying papers, stray books, stacked books-books "e;not yet touched by the mild boredom of order"e;-and a bearded mage. Cannon takes the reader through different periods of Benjamin's writing: "e;Artifacts of Youth,"e; nostalgic musings on his childhood; "e;Fragments of a Critical Eye,"e; early writings, political observations, and cultural criticism; "e;Athenaeum of Imagination,"e; meditations on philosophy and psychology; "e;A Stroll through the Arcades,"e; Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus; and "e;A Collection of Dreams and Stories,"e; experimental and fantastical writings.With drawings and text, Cannon offers a phantasmagorical tribute to Benjamin's wandering eye.