On Goethe

by Peter D. Fenves

ISBN: 9781503642225

Published: 2025-04-29

On Goethe contains the full range of Walter Benjamin's reflections on the central figure in modern German culture. The writings in this volume--newly translated, fully annotated, and framed by an extensive introduction--display a variety of styles and cover a vast array of topics. The collection revolves around two strikingly different essays. Whereas "Goethe's Elective Affinities" develops a theory of critique in which a work is illuminated wholly from within itself, an article Benjamin wrote on Goethe for the Soviet Encyclopedia represents his first large-scale attempt to elaborate a historical-materialist methodology. The other thirty translations stand in similarly productive tension with one another. Some are concerned with concepts of beauty and categories of the aesthetic, others with the relation of art to politics and the status of "classical authors" in contemporary culture, and still others with what remains of humanistic traditions in the wake of their disappearance...