The Late Walter Benjamin: (New Directions in Religion and Literature)

A startling critical-creative examination of one of the 20th Century's leading thinkers, The Late Walter Benjamin is a documentary novel that juxtaposes the life and death of Walter Benjamin with the days, hours and minutes of a working-class council estate on the edge of London in post-war Austerity England. The novel centres on one particular tenant who claims to be Walter Benjamin, and only ever uses words written by Benjamin, apparently oblivious that the real Benjamin committed suicide 20 years earlier whilst fleeing the Nazis. Initially set in the sixties, the text slips back to the early years of the estate and to Benjamin's last days, as he moves across Europe seeking ever-more desperately to escape the Third Reich. Through this fictional narrative, John Schad explores not only the emergence of Benjamin's thinking from a politicised Jewish theology forced to confront the rise of Nazism but also the implications of his utopian Marxism, forged in exile, for the very different context of a displaced working class community in post-war Britain.

Table of Contents:
Preface \ Acknowledgements \ List of Illustrations \ A Note Left Behind \ 1. The Gate \ 2. The House \ 3. Two Films Are Briefly Projected \ 4. The Front Room \ 5. Still the Front Room \ 6. The Garden in the Evening \ 7. Still the Garden in the Evening \ 8. The Garden, Now Frozen, At Night \ 9. Still the Frosted Garden At Night \ 10. The Coronation and the Beautiful Pouring Rain \ 11. Still the Coronation and the Beautiful Pouring Rain \ 12. Removal \ 13. The Threshold of the Hotel \ Post-face \ Notes \ Index

About the Author :
John Schad is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Lancaster, UK

Review :
...mixes apparently autobiographical fiction and social history with astute critical reworking of many of Walter Benjamin's most important ideas. As fascinating as the most experimental avant-garde mobilizations of literature during the interwar period. Stein, Breton, Pirandello and Pessoa come to mind. Says something previously unsaid about not only Walter Benjamin but post-war Austerity Britain...and does so on the basis of rigorous historical and philosophical analysis. This is a witty, smart novel that combines literary criticism with philosophy and local history…This book will delight and challenge readers and admirers of Benjamin, and it will intrigue anyone interested in intellectual and social history. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All Readers. [A] clever, idiosyncratic novella … The great value of Schad’s narrative is its attempt to uncover the sort of ‘revolutionary energy’ in the story of a post-war North-London council estate that, for all its difficulties, managed somewhat heroically to create an environment defined above all by optimism, vitality, and buried glimpses of utopia.