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 '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.