Benjamin / Barthes

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
• Convenor: to be confirmed
• Assessment: to be confirmed

Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes were two of the twentieth century’s most brilliantly distinctive and enduringly influential commentators on literature and culture. Benjamin’s enigmatic mind glowed through the first half of the century; Barthes’ quicksilver intelligence sparkled across the second. You will have the chance to read both writers in detail. Writings considered will date from the 1920s up to 1980; but rather than reading them in chronological order, we will consider them in thematic groupings that let us compare and contrast the two critics’ different approaches to similar writers and themes.

While literature will be a constant reference point, our focus will be on critical essays and theoretical meditations. You should be prepared to engage with concepts and arguments about subjects like literature, photography, film, cities and love. Yet the works considered are also fine pieces of writing (and translation) in their own right.

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was uncelebrated in his lifetime, but posthumously became an icon for modern German letters, cultural theory and the political Left. He wrote with idiosyncratic insight about literature, often championing new and challenging twentieth-century writers.  He also made distinctive, influential contributions to the fields of philosophy, theology, sociology, history, urbanism, film and media.

The restless pen of Roland Barthes (1915-1980) left its mark on literary criticism, structuralism and semiotics, cultural studies, photography, fashion, gender studies, biography and travel writing. While for much of his career he sought political rigour in the struggle against bourgeois ideology, his late work increasingly engaged in memoir, diaristic meditations and self-revelation.

Direct, biographical links between the two thinkers are few. But they form a suggestive pairing with which to consider modern literature and ideas: both were modernists; both developed innovative forms in their own writing; both belonged to the political Left; both sought to describe what a politically progressive art would look like; both were pioneers in the theory of photography; both produced not just rigorous theoretical tracts but personal writings of lyrical tenderness. All these aspects of their work will be available for comparative discussion on this module.

Benjamin wrote in German, Barthes in French, but all the texts studied will be in translation. We will be reading:

Benjamin

• Illuminations
• One Way Street
• Understanding Brecht

Barthes

• Mythologies
• Critical Essays
• A Barthes Reader
• Camera Lucida

Other

• Bertolt Brecht, A Mother