Myth and Metropolis (eBook)

Graeme Gilloch is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Salford. His research interests include contemporary social and cultural theory and visual culture.

Acknowledgements.

List of Abbreviations.

Introduction.

1. Urban Images: From Ruins to Revolutions.

2. Urban Memories: Labyrinth and Childhood.

3. Dialectical Images: Paris and the Phantasmagoria of
Modernity.

4. Urban Allegories: Paris, Baudelaire and the Experience of
Modernity.

Conclusion.

Notes.

Biography.

Index.

"This is a highly stimulating contribution to our understanding of
Benjamin's work on the city. It is one which is written with a
commendable clarity that makes Benjamin's often complex
investigations accessible to students without losing the rich
textual diversity of Benjamin's own presentation of the city's
labyrinths."

-- Professor David Frisby, Glasgow University

"Walter Benjamin and his work on the metropolis is the topic of
a new study by Graeme Gilloch, a study so rigorous in its
scholarship and penetrating in its observations that it rises above
the recent plethora of lesser works on Benjamin. This elegant study
now displaces Susan Buck-Morss's Dialectics of Seeing as the
most authoritative work on Benjamin and the city. Gilloch situates
Benjamin's discussion of the city within his overall theoretical
outlook, evocatively highlighting the surrealist, Marxist and
Freudian impulses in Benjamin. The result is as convincing as it is
charming." (Building Design)

"[A] close and sensitive reading of Benjamin ... Since Gilloch's
book is clearly and lucidly written, it can be recommended for
teaching for students, although it is also an interesting and
indeed valuable commentary in its own right." (Urban
Studies)

"Graeme Gilloch's excellent book now offers a comprehensive
overview of Benjamin's urban preoccupations, which will be
essential reading for anyone seeking a detailed account of
Benjamin's complex relationship with the city. The whole book is an
exemplary study and can be thoroughly recommended ... probably the
most accessible recent book on Benjamin's thought available to the
advanced undergraduate student. This is a book of exemplary
scholarship which will become a central resource for advancing our
understanding both of Benjamin's work and urban theory in future
years." (Environment and Planning)

"Remarkable and scholarly book, a work of almost overwhelming
erudition and full of incisive observations ... perceptive
interpretation ... elegant and highly readable. An excellent
example of concise writing which, given the often contradictory
nature of Benjamin's work, must have been a major task. The ease
with which Gilloch disentangles Benjamin's thought processes leads
one to suspect a superficiality of approach but this is far from
the case. Gilloch's masterful analysis now displaces Susan
Buck-Morss's book as the definitive work on Benjamin and the city.
Benjamin's message is as relevant today as when it was written,
providing the historian, design or otherwise, with the most
incisive commentrary on the experience of modernity yet to be
written." (The Journal of Design History)

"Urban historians will be indebted to Gilloch for his labours.
What he has done ... is to make one of the classic texts on the
modern city more accessible to those not steeped in the Benjamin
oeuvre." (Urban History)