Wednesday, March 19, 2014

"This is what God put me on earth to do, to bring Benjamin to America"

At the Chronicle, Eric Banks on the life and afterlife of Walter Benjamin. A great piece to read (Lindsay Waters is an intellectual hero!) - a reminder of how contingent the survival and dissemination of someone's work may be.

Have been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be an academic insider/gatekeeper (this has been much on my mind over the past week - also reported here). And from another standpoint, the lack of clear correlation between brilliance and success in a fairly remorseless pipeline....

1 comment:

  1. Lindsay is such an oddly tangential figure in my life: father-in-law's devoted editor and parent of one of my campers when I ran a summer camp, and I didn't realize the overlap till somewhat later!

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