Arcades Project  

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Passagenwerk or Arcades Project is Walter Benjamin's final, unfinished work, an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, especially concerned with the roofed outdoor "arcades" which created the city's distinctive street life and culture of flânerie. Written between 1927 and 1940, it has been posthumously edited and published in many languages in its unfinished form.

Many scholars believe it one of the great texts of 20th-century cultural criticism.

Publication history

The notes and manuscripts for the Arcades Project and much of Benjamin's correspondence had been entrusted to his friend Georges Bataille before Benjamin left Paris. Bataille saw to it that it was hidden in a closed archive at the Bibliothèque Nationale, where it was finally discovered. The full text of Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus (as far as it could be reconstructed; of course this is in many ways a multi-layered palimpsest and some of the allusions in the parts that were "notebook material" are highly elliptic) was printed in the 1980s after years of difficult editorial work: it was hailed as one of the milestones of 20th century literary criticism and theory (and surrounded by controversy over the methods of the editor) and as a forerunner of postmodernism.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Arcades Project" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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