Illuminations includes Benjamin's views on Kafka, with whom he felt the closest personal affinity, his studies on Baudelaire and Proust (both of whom he translated), his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an illuminating discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his thesis on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and prefaces them with a substantial, admirably informed introduction that presents Benjamin's personality and intellectual development, as well as his work and his life in dark times. Reflections the companion volume to this book, is also available as a Schocken paperback.Unpacking My Library, 1931The Task of the Translator, 1913The Storyteller, 1936Franz Kafka, 1934Some Reflections on Kafka, 1938What Is Epic Theater?, 1939On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, 1939The Image of Proust, 1929The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936Theses on the Philosophy of History, written 1940, pub. 1950

    From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. The Space of Literature, first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language.

    For, next to the colossal figure of W.E.B. Du Bois, Padmore, the political revolutionary, holds an exalted position in the pantheon of Pan-Africanism, and in this, his chef d'oeuvre, he has presented us with a most vivid account of that movement in which he played so exemplary a role. Indeed, there was in Padmore an admirable double-faceted vis historica - the revolutionary's desire to make history and the writer's impulse to describe it and grasp its meaning.The name George Padmore is a nom de guerre that he adopted when he joined the Communist Party. His real name was Malcolm Nurse. He rose to become the foremost black figure in the Communist International - the Comintern - and he was commissioned into the Red Army as a colonel. He travelled extensively in Africa in an effort to create the nucleus of a Comintern-directed African leadership. In this book he gives a graphic exposition of the history of African, West Indian and American Negro mass movements from 1787 to 1957, and their flirtations with International Communism. He helped to shape much of the latter phases of that affair. Soviet policy finally induced Padmore's resignation from the Comintern and also from the Communist Party. As Aimé Césaire stated when he too broke with the Communists twenty-five years later: 'It's neither Marxism nor Communism I repudiate; the use certain people have made of Marxism and Communism is what I condemn. What I want is that Marxism and Communism be harnessed into the service of coloured peoples, and not coloured people into the service of Marxism and Communism. That the doctrine and the movement be tailored to fit men, not men to fit the movement. And - of course - that goes for others besides Communists.'But in severing connections with them, Padmore did not join the frenzied ranks of the professional anti-Communists in remorseful contrition and fulminations over the god that failed them. Nor did he reconcile himself to imperialism and the oppressions of African peoples. There was in him a need to intensify the struggle against imperialism as also against that Communism which has been polluted by the exigencies of Stalin's balance-of-power political struggles with the Western countries. Arthur Koestler once wrote that 'if we survey history and compare the lofty aims in the name of which revolutions were started, and the sorry end to which they came, we see again and again how a polluted civilization pollutes its own revolutionary offspring'. Such an observation would lead - as, curiously, it did not lead Koestler - to the conclusion that if indeed the 'revolutionary offspring', Communism, has been 'polluted' by the civilization against which it has revolted, the struggle against this pollution becomes at once and simultaneously the struggle against the polluted offspring as also and inevitably against the source of that pollution. Padmore drew this conclusion. For though conceived by him as a bulwark against Communism, yet 'Pan-Africanism recognizes much that is true in the Marxist interpretation of history, since it provides a rational explanation for a good deal that would otherwise be unintelligible.'– Azinna NwaforThis book recounts the great saga of the rise of black people from slavery to freedom on an intercontinental scale and brings us to the crucial crossroads - a hopeful resolution for black freedom and a partnership of races purged of terror, lynching and colour lines, etc., or a continental mass struggle conducted by Africans in Africa, a struggle that will duplicate the tragic upheavals in Asia. It is not [solely] up to black men to say how this issue will be resolved; but make no mistake: the black man will cling tenaciously to his dream of freedom!If my words carry any weight, I commend this volume for close study to the white governmental officials of the Western world, to white churchmen, Catholic and Protestant alike, and equally to the dour and brooding white rulers in the Kremlin. I would urge them to read it and get a true, human perspective of the hopes, fears, struggles and hard-bought progress of the Negro in the modern world.I, for one, salute and congratulate George Padmore for his having kept the faith and fought the good fight.– Richard Wright

    Two Case Histories: 'Little Hans' and the 'Rat Man' (1909)This collection of twenty-four volumes is the first full paperback publication of the standard edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud in EnglishIncludes:Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy (1909)Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909)

    This classic volume set the stage for all subsequent studies of the interaction of mass media and interpersonal influence in the making of everyday decisions in public affairs, fashion, movie-going, and consumer behavior. The contextualizing essay in Part One dwells on the surprising relevance of primary groups to the flow of mass communication. Peter Simonson of the University of Pittsburgh has written that "Personal Influence was perhaps the most influential book in mass communication research of the postwar era, and it remains a signal text with historic significance and ongoing reverberations...more than any other single work, it solidified what came to be known as the dominant paradigm in the field, which later researchers were compelled either to cast off or build upon." In his introduction to this fiftieth-anniversary edition, Elihu Katz discusses the theory and methodology that underlie the Decatur study and evaluates the legacy of his coauthor and mentor, Paul F. Lazarsfeld.