Publisher's Synopsis
Though published during his lifetime, Walter Benjamin's dream notes and theoretical reflections on dreams are collected here for the first time in a single volume.
Dreams highlights a dimension of Benjamin's thinking that was invaluable for his writing and thought but which has thus far received little attention.
The first section, "Dream Notes," is a comprehensive and chronological collection of Benjamin's transcriptions of his own dreams and includes unpublished manuscript materials. The second section, "On Perception of Dreams: Awakening and Dream," features his theoretical reflections on dreams, ranging from short aphorisms and longer analyses of dream literature and the history of dreams to the political conception of a "dreaming collective" and its awakening.
Editor Burkhardt Lindner describes Benjamin's literary approach to his own dreams in the epilogue and gives a sketch of Benjamin's own definition of the dream sphere, independent of and in contrast to Surrealism and Freud's interpretation of dreams.
This handsome, pocket-sized reader presents Benjamin as both a great dreamer and an important theorist of dreams.
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is one of the 20th century's most influential theorists and critics. A member of the Frankfurt school alongside Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch and Max Horkheimer, he also maintained close friendships with thinkers such as Marxist theorist Georg Lukács, playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. Among Benjamin's best-known works are the essays "The Task of the Translator" (1923), "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940). His major work as a literary critic included essays on Baudelaire, Goethe, Kafka, Kraus, Leskov, Proust, Walser and Scheerbart. In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French-Spanish border while attempting to escape from invading Nazi forces.
