Walter Benjamin is now widely recognized as one of the most original and perceptive thinkers of the twentieth century. This book is a timely and lucid study of Benjamin's lifelong fascination with the city and forms of metropolitan experience.Benjamin's critical and complex account of the modern urban environment is traced through a number of key texts: the pioneering sketches of Naples, Marseilles and Moscow; his childhood reminiscences of Berlin; and his brilliant and unfinished studies of nineteenth-century Paris and the poet Charles Baudelaire.
Gilloch emphasizes the importance of these writings for an interpretation of Benjamin's work as a whole, and highlights their relevance for our contemporary understanding of modernity.
