The Berlin Chronicle Notices

A companion volume to Walter Benjamin's (1892-1940) memoir "Berlin Childhood circa 1900, The "Berlin Chronicle" Notices" is now in a new translation by Carl Skoggard. The German-Jewish philosopher, theorist and critic Walter Benjamin began to ruminate on his comfortable Berlin childhood in 1932, not long before he would flee Germany for good to escape the Nazis. The resulting "Berlin Chronicle" notices--40 in all--do not result in a linear narrative but instead remain fragmentary recollections of Benjamin's young years, from his early childhood to the threshold of adulthood. More generally, they are a series of profound explorations of memory and of the ways memory relates to place. Rich in and of themselves, these notices greatly illuminate "Berlin Childhood circa 1900," written by Benjamin months later. This translation, in a charming pocket-sized format, comes with an extensive commentary, a historical map of Berlin and numerous illustrations.

Proceedings of the Numismatic Society form a separately paged section of each vol.

A user-friendly guide to reading, writing, and theorizing autobiographical texts and practices for students, scholars, and practitioners of life narrative The boom in autobiographical narratives continues apace. It now encompasses a global spectrum of texts and practices in such media as graphic memoir, auto-photography, performance and plastic arts, film and video, and online platforms. Reading Autobiography Now offers both a critical engagement with life narrative in historical perspective and a theoretical framework for interpreting texts and practices in this wide-ranging field. Hailed upon its initial publication as “the Whole Earth Catalog of autobiography studies,” this essential book has been updated, reorganized, and expanded in scope to serve as an accessible and contemporary guide for scholars, students, and practitioners. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explore definitions of life narrative, probe issues of subjectivity, and outline salient features of autobiographical acts and practices. In this updated edition, they address emergent topics such as autotheory, autofiction, and autoethnography; expand the discussions of identity, relationality, and agency; and introduce new material on autobiographical archives and the profusion of “I”s in contemporary works. Smith and Watson also provide a helpful toolkit of strategies for reading life narrative and an extensive glossary of mini-essays analyzing key theoretical concepts and dozens of autobiographical genres. An indispensable exploration of this expansive, transnational, multimedia field, Reading Autobiography Now meticulously unpacks the heterogeneous modes of life narratives through which people tell their stories, from traditional memoirs and trauma narratives to collaborative life narrative and autobiographical comics.

This book is a fascinating, wide-reaching interdisciplinary examination of urbanism in the context of humanities and social sciences research, comprising cutting-edge theoretical and empirical investigations of urban livability and sustainability. Urban livability is explored as a phenomenon of happenings that gather people, things, and domains in the specific spatiotemporal context of the city; this context is the life-world of urbanism. Meanwhile, sustainability is conceived of as the capacity of urbanism that enables people to cultivate their sociocultural and economic existence and development without the depletion of their current resources in the future. In this study, phenomenology is uniquely incorporated as a way of seeing things according to their presence in space and time.