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Cultural and aesthetic theorist, literary critic, social semiotician, philosopher of history, media theorist, poet, journalist, architectural critic, autobiographer, and political thinker, Walter Benjamin figures among the most significant twentieth-century European intellectuals. Whether read in the context of philosophical hermeneutics, poststructuralism, Jewish theology, modern literary and cultural studies, or the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, his writings have influenced a wide range of scholarly disciplines, and they continue to be a source of inspiration and provocation for a diverse general readership. Benjamin's striking insights and unexpected perspectives on a variety of cultural phenomena have given his famously difficult writings canonical status, a status that was solidified with the publication of his Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings, 1972-1989), consisting of fourteen books in seven volumes, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Benjamin's texts, which always remain committed to a consideration of the problems of language and representation, enact the phenomenon he described in his 1929 travelogue "San Gimignano," collected in volume four of his Gesammelte Schriften (1972): "Worte zu dem zu finden, was man vor Augen hat--wie schwer kann das sein.
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