Arcades Project

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Passagenwerk or Arcades Project was Walter Benjamin's lifelong project, an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, especially concerned with the roofed outdoor "arcades" which created the city's distinctive street life and culture of flânerie. The project, which many scholars believe might have become one of the great texts of 20th-century cultural criticism, was never completed. Written between 1927 and 1940, it has been posthumously edited and published in many languages in its unfinished form.

[edit] Publication history

The notes and manuscripts for the Arcades Project and much of Benjamin's correspondence had been entrusted to his friend Georges Bataille before Benjamin left Paris. Bataille saw to that it was hidden in a closed archive at the Bibliothèque Nationale, where it was finally discovered. The full text of Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus (as far as it could be reconstructed; of course this is in many ways a multi-layered palimpsest and some of the allusions in the parts that were "notebook material" are highly elliptic) was printed in the 1980s after years of difficult editorial work: it was hailed as one of the milestones of 20th century literary criticism and theory (and surrounded by controversy over the methods of the editor) and as a forerunner of postmodernism.