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• W333259737 abstract "Gillian Piggott. Dickens and Benjamin: Moments of Revelation, Fragments of Modernity. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Pp xviii + 256. $119.95; 65 [pounds sterling]. Gillian Piggott's study of the resonances between the work of Charles Dickens and Walter Benjamin arrives in the wake of an increasing critical interest in life and thought, as an array of books from Graham Gilloch's Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (1996) to Esther Leslie's biographical Walter Benjamin (2007), and beyond, makes clear. While many critics have addressed importance to discussions of nineteenth-century modernity, Piggott's is the first booklength attempt to compare Benjamin and Dickens. Fler goal is to produce creative comparison of the authors' responses to (4) rather than establish direct lines of influence, though she points out that Benjamin was aware of at least some of Dickens's work, particularly The Old Curiosity Shop and Great Expectations (11), and included fifteen entries about him in the Arcades Project (1927-40). With the aim of thematic comparison in mind, Piggott divides her book into two parts (consisting of two chapters each), the first looking at the messianic and the baroque in the two writers, focusing mainly upon The Old Curiosity Shop, and the second looking at the city in terms of experience, memory, the flaneur and the crowd--all key categories for Benjamin. This second section considers number of Dickens's works, including Sketches by Boz, Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield, with the latter being the subject of close study of Dickens's approach to memory. In the first part, Piggott explores Messianic Worldview (21), drawing upon his early pre-Marxist writings, such as the essay On Language as Such and on the Language of Man (1916), to argue for correlation between his philosophical outlook and that of The Old Curiosity Shop. This is fertile ground, since Dickens's novel is the topic of 1931 essay by Theodor Adorno, quoted by Benjamin in the Arcades Project, which views it as the site of melancholy decay of the pre-capitalist subject in the face of an encroaching commodity culture. Such world, however, still offers some potential for transformation. Piggott, outlook is more religiously inflected than Adorno's, influenced by the belief that messiah will arrive to bring about a massive uprooting and total destruction of the existing order (21). As result, her reading of Dickens's novel focuses on the religious dimension of Nell's suffering, viewing her as messianic figure mired in sin and/or suffering who can at the same time experience [her] self as, or appear to others to be, redeemed (36). Such redemption comes when truth, the absolute or God floods in upon everyday experience, as when Nell, sitting in the chapel in the latter part of the novel, pictures her own death in state of contentment (47). While such reading of The Old Curiosity Shop is compelling on its own terms, it tends to produce picture of Benjamin which elides the differences between him and the messianism upon which he draws. At one point, for instance, Benjamin's messianic theology and Jewish messianic thinking (27) are taken for synonyms. This gives us nostalgic, religious Benjamin who is perpetually attempting to restore broken world to state of wholeness; an idealist figure in the mold of the German Romantics, who believes in fixed, transcendent absolute and whose attitude to modernity is one of mourning. Typical is Piggott's claim that For Benjamin, there is an urgent need for remembrance, for recognition of redemptive moments and religious meaning (50). While this captures one side of Benjamin, it does not give sufficient credit to his adaptation and transformation of the messianic tradition, which makes the messianic moment of radical revolutionary opening at least as much as return to what has been lost. …" @default.
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• W333259737 title "Gillian Piggott. Dickens and Benjamin: Moments of Revelation, Fragments of Modernity" @default.
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