DuBois & Benjamin
W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter Benjamin were two of the most prolific and imaginative critical thinkers of the 20th century. The content of their work frequently converges: both were concerned with “the tradition of the oppressed” (Benjamin), espoused different forms of messianism, engaged extensively and idiosyncratically with Marxism, and provided theories of modernity that were not progressive, but attempted to salvage supposedly premodern aspects, while taking into account the newly urban environments of Berlin, Philadelphia, New York, and Paris. Both Du Bois and Benjamin wrote in many genres: the essay, the sociological study, poetry, the novel, critical (literary) history, journalistic writings such as reviews, and autobiographical texts.
This course will consist of close and careful readings of the ideas and stylistic dimensions of Benjamin’s and Du Bois’s major essays and longer works in order to understand each thinker’s specificity and suggest fruitful ways to read them together as major theorists of western modernity.
Schedule
Th 1/ 4 Course Introduction
Tu 1/ 9 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Th 1/11 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Tu 1/16 Benjamin, One-Way Street in Selected Writings I
Th 1/18 Benjamin, Critique of Violence, On Language, Task of the Translator, Capitalism as Religion in
SW I
Tu 1/23 Du Bois, Darkwater
Th 1/25 Benjamin, Surrealism in Selected Writings II-1 and Karl Kraus, Franz Kafka in SWII-2 and
Storyteller SWIII.
Tu 1/30 Benjamin, Destructive Character, Doctrine of the Similar, On the Mimetic Faculty, Experience and
Poverty in SWII.
Th 2/1 Du Bois, Dark Princess
Tu 2/ 6 Du Bois, Dark Princess
Th 2/8 Benjamin, Berlin Childhood (final version) in SWIII and Benjamin, Berlin Chronicle in SWII-2
Tu 2/13 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (excerpts)
Th 2/15 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama
Tu 2/20 Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Expose I and II; Convolut N), The Paris of the Second Empire in
SW IV
Th 2/22 Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro
Tu 2/27 Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro and Sociology Hesitant (blackboard)
Th 3 /1 Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 2nd Version in SWIII & Work of
Art (3rd Version) in SWI
Tu 3/6 Benjamin, Theological-Political Fragment in SWIII, On the Concept of History SW IV; Du Bois, The
Propaganda of History.