Walter Benjamin

[alice malice]

How to explain the Benjamin vogue? Eiland and Jennings cite such
cultural signposts as the radical student movement of the 1960s and
the attendant revival of Marxist thought. But 60s radicals were hardly
great readers, and Benjamin's writings are, to say the least,
maddeningly opaque and often altogether inaccessible. As for his
Marxism, such as it was: if that is the main point of attraction, by
rights the real culture hero should be his contemporary Herbert
Marcuse (1898-1979)--once famed as the "father of the New Left" but,
these days, decidedly not a name to conjure with.

More likely, Benjamin owes his fame to the rise of cultural studies
and its various academic subdisciplines: post-modernism,
post-structuralism, women's and gender studies, and the rest of the
lot. In these precincts, Benjamin's gnomic style may well count as a
plus, an outward sign of inward profundity that, simultaneously,
invites the most fanciful flights of interpretive ingenuity. Likewise
contributing powerfully to his allure is the sorry story of his life.
Quite apart from his tragic end--he swallowed poison while fleeing from
Nazi-occupied France--he was always the frustrated outsider par
excellence, the very type of the marginal man. Indeed, had he lived,
one can hardly picture him as a happy soldier among the academic
janissaries of contemporary cultural studies.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/tesserae/2014/04/the-walter-benjamin-brigade/
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l