Menunggu Illuminations tiba di pangkuan

Antara rujukan yang selalu dirujuk oleh pengarang Hitler's Private Library ialah tulisan Walter Benjamin menerusi buku beliau Illuminations: Essays and Reflections.

Siapa Walter Benjamin? Ini maklumat yang saya dapat dari wikipedia:

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (15 July 1892 – 27 September 1940) was a German intellectual (philosopher, sociologist, literary critic, translator, essayist) occasionally associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His sociologic and cultural critical thought, combining historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism, proved a novel contribution to aesthetic theory and to Western Marxism. As a literary critic, his most famous essays are about Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), coiner of the term Modernism; as a translator he produced the Tableaux Parisiens edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857), by Baudelaire, and À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), by Marcel Proust (1871–1922).

His turning to Marxism in the 1930s, resulted from the influence of playwright friend Bertolt Brecht, whose critical aesthetics developed the Verfremdungseffekt (emotional distancing of the spectator). An earlier influence was friend Gershom Scholem, founder of the academic study of the Kabbalah and of Jewish mysticism. Intellectually influenced by the Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–87), Walter Benjamin coined the term “auratic perception”, denoting the æsthetic faculty via which civilization would recover appreciation of myth.^[1] Contemporarily, Benjamin's work is oft-cited in academic and literary studies, especially the essays The Task of the Translator (1923) and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936).

Yang menarik perhatian saya tentang Walter Benjamin (dan ingin mengenali tulisan-tulisan beliau) ialah kata-kata beliau mengenai buku, pembaca dan pemiliknya. Kerana itulah, saya sedang menunggu buku antologi artikel beliau untuk tiba di pangkuan - mungkin 2-3 minggu lagi....