DuBois & Benjamin

W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter Benjamin were two of the most prolific and imaginative critical thinkers of the 20^th 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.