James Joyce and Walter Benjamin

Catherine Flynn compares Ulysses with the Arcades Project

André Kertész

Over at Berfrois, Catherine Flynn draws connections between James Joyce's modernist masterpiece Ulysses and Walter Benjamin's hugely ambitious Arcades Project (link via 3:AM Magazine): 'Learning to read Ulysses means tracing a path through its strangeness. Becoming familiar with the twists and turns of its prose and the multitude of characters that pass through its pages can also mean forgetting the work’s initial effects of disorientation and fragmentation. It shares these effects with Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, in which the reader is thrust into a massive collection of facts, quotations, insights and references.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Christopher Hitchens on James Joyce's Ulysses
• James Joyce's Family Passport
• Walter Benjamin, Early Writing, 1910-1917
• Eli Friedlander, Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait