Princeton University

Michael Jennings has taught at Princeton since 1981; his teaching and research focus on European culture in the twentieth century. In addition to literature, he teaches on topics in cultural theory and the visual arts, with special emphasis on photography. He approaches cultural material from a perspective informed by historicist interpretive strategies and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. He is the author of two books on Walter Benjamin: Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism (Cornell University Press, 1981) and, with Howard Eiland, The Author as Producer: A Life of Walter Benjamin   (Harvard University Press, forthcoming in 2010). He also serves as the general editor of the standard English-language edition of Benjamin's works, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings (Harvard University Press, four volumes, 1996ff.) and the editor of a series of collections of Benjamin's essays intended for classroom use, including The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (2007); with Brigid Doherty and Thomas Levin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media (2008) ; and, with Miriam Bratu Hansen, One Way Street (2009). His published work includes articles on the theory of art history (Alois Riegl, Wihelm Worringer), modernism in its relationship to capitalist modernity (Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, Uwe Johnson), Weimar culture (Berlin Dada, Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann, forms of literary criticism), eighteenth-century aesthetics (Sturm und Drang, J.M.R. Lenz, Friedrich Hölderlin) and the photo-essay (August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Michael Schmidt). He is the editor, with Detlef Mertins, of a facsimile edition of the avantgarde journal G: Journal of Elemental Form-Creation, (forthcoming from the Gerry Research Institute), with Uwe Steiner, of a volume of essays on Uwe Johnson's Jahrestage (forthcoming from Wilhelm Fink Verlag), and, with Tobias Wilke, of a special issue of Grey Room on Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Media. He is currently at work on two book projects: studies of the German photo-essay in the twentieth century and of aesthetics and politics in the "long" German 1960's.

Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism, Cornell University Press, 1987

The Author as Producer: A Critical Biography of Walter Benjamin, Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, Harvard University Press, 2010

General Editor, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Harvard University Press, 1996ff.:

• Volume I: Metaphysics of Youth, Writings 1912-1926, Michael Jennings and Marcus Bullock, eds., 520 pp., 1996

• Volume II: Crisis and Criticism, Writings 1926-1934, Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, eds, 870 pp., 1999

• Volume III: Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, Writings 1935-1938, Michael Jennings and Howard Eiland, eds.,462 pp., 2002

• Volume IV: On the Concept of History, Writings 1938-1940, Michael Jennings and Howard Eiland, eds., 478 pp., 2003

Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, Michael Jennings, ed., Harvard University Press, 2006

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media, Michael Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Levin, eds., Harvard University Press, 2008

Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, Miriam Bratu Hansen and Michael Jennings, eds., Harvard University Press, 2010

G: Elements for elemental Form-Creation, Michael Jennings and Detlef Mertins, eds., Getty Research Institute Press, 2010 (A facsimile translation with critical essays and a scholarly apparatus of a key German avantgarde journal from the early 1920’s)

Uwe Johnsons Jahrestage, Michael Jennings and Uwe Steiner, eds.,Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2010

Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Media, special issue of Grey Room, Michael Jennings and Tobias Wilke, eds., 2010

"Benjamin as a Reader of Hölderlin: The Origin of Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism," German Quarterly, 56, No. 4 (1983), 544-562

"Mystical Selfhood and Self-Delusion: Narrative and Ethical Experimentation in Musil's ‘Grigia,'" Modern Austrian Literature, 17, No. 1 (1984), 59-77

"Benjamin-Scholem Briefwechsel," (with Stanley Corngold), Interpretation, 12, Nos. 2/3 (1984), 357-366

"'Vergessen von aller Welt.' Literatur, Politik und Identität in Klingers Dramen des Sturm und Drang," Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 104, no. 4 (1985), 494-506

"Walter Benjamin in Recent Critical Perspective" (with Stanley Corngold), Modern Language Studies, 16, no. 3 (1986), 367-73

"Robert Musil and the Currents of Literary Modernism," in Major Figures of Modern Austrian Literature, ed. Donald G. Daviau, (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 1988), 315-340

"Reply to Richard Sieburth, 'Benjamin the Scrivener,'" Assemblage 7 (1988), 118-121

"Robert Musil," Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twentieth Century German and Austrian Prose Fiction to 1945, ed. James Hardin (Columbia, S.C.: Bruccoli-Clark, 1989), pp. 1-26

"Between Allegory and Aura: Walter Benjamin's 1938 Reading of Franz Kafka," Journal of the Kafka Society of America (1989), nos. 1-2, 42-50

"Eine gewaltige Erschütterung des Tradierten: Walter Benjamin's Political Recuperation of Franz Kafka," in Stephen Taubeneck, ed., Fictions of Culture: Essays in Honor of Walter Sokel (Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1991), pp. 199-214

"Absolute Fragmentation: Walter Benjamin and Romantic Art Criticism," Journal of Literary Criticism, vol. VI, no. 1 (1993), pp. 1-18

“Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History” in Uwe Steiner, ed., Walter Benjamin (Berlin: Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1992), pp. 77-102

“Metaphysik der Jugend. Friedrich Hölderlin, Walter Benjamin und die Jugendbewegung,” in Bad Homburger Hölderlin-Vorträge (Publikationen der Deutschen Hölderlin-Gesellschaft), pp. 23-32

“Against Expressionism: Wilhelm Worringer’s Theory of Art and Society,” in Neil Donahue, ed., Invisible Cathedrals: The German Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer (Penn State Press, 1994), pp. 87-104

"Chronology, 1892-1926" (with Marcus Bullock), in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume One, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 490-515

"Of Weimar's First and Last 5ings: Montage, Revolution, and Fascism in Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz and November 1918," in Beth Bjorklund and Mark Cory, eds, Politics in German Literature, (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1998), 132-152

"Das Trugbild der Stabilität. Politik und Montagetheorie in Walter Benjamins Einbahnstraße" in Klaus Garber, ed., global benjamin. Internationaler Walter Benjamin Kongreß 1992 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1999), 517-528

"Chronology, 1927-1934" (with Howard Eiland), in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume Two, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 823-56

“Agriculture, Industry, and the Birth of the Photo Essay in the Late Weimar Republic,” October 93, Summer 2000, 23-56

“On the Banks of a New Lethe: Commodification and Experience in Walter Benjamin’s Late Work,” Boundary 2, vol. 30, no. 4 (2003), pp. 89-104

"Chronology, 1935-1938" (with Howard Eiland), in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume !ree, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 417-47

“Chronology, 1938-1940,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume Four (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 427-47

“Not Fade Away: The Face of German History in Michael Schmidt’s Ein-Heit” October 106 (Fall 2003), pp. 137-150

“Walter Benjamin and the European Avant-Garde,” lead essay in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, David Ferris, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 18-34

"Introduction: Walter Benjamin reads Charles Baudelaire,” in Jennings, ed., Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 1-25; 213-216

"Introduction," pp. 1-8; "The Production, Reproduction, and Reception of the Work of Art," pp. 9-18; "Script / Image / Script-image" (with Brigid Doherty), pp. 167-70; "Photography," pp. 263-69; and "Modern Media" (with Thomas Levin), pp. 343-352, in Jennings, Doherty, and Levin, eds., Walter Benjamin, Th e Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008)

"Moholy-Nagy: Photogram" in Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickermann, eds., Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), pp. 216-225

“The Mausoleum of Youth: Between Experience and Nihilism in Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood,”  Paragraph, 32:3 (2009), pp. 313-330

"The Object of Culture: Cultural Studies and the Demise of American Germanistik" in The Meaning of Culture: German Studies in the 21st Century, Martin Kagel and Laura Tate Kagel, eds. (Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2009), pp. 33-41

"Introduction," (with Miriam Hansen), Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, Miriam Hansen and Michael Jennings, eds., Harvard University Press, forthcoming, 2010

“Introduction: The G-Group and Avantgarde Culture in the Weimar Republic” (with Detlef Mertins), forthcoming in Jennings and Mertins, eds., G: Elements for elemental Form-Creation, Los Angeles:  Getty Research Institute, 2010

“Blurred Cognition, ca. 1962: Document and Representation in Alexander Kluge and Uwe Johnson” forthcoming in Jennings and Steiner, eds., Uwe Johnsons Jahrestage (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2009)

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Stephen Lehmann and Marion Faber, trans., The NewYork Times Book Review, Dec. 23, 1984, 17

Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin, eds.,The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America, The German Quarterly, 58, No. 1 (1985), 97-100

Michael Beddow, The Fiction of Humanity: Studies in the Bildungsroman from Wieland to Thomas Mann, The German Quarterly, 57, No. 3 (1984), 495-6

Thomas Degering, Das Elend der Entsagung: Goethes "Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre" and Hans Rudolf Vaget, Goethe: Der Mann von 60 Jahren, The German Quarterly, 57, No. 3 (1984), 476-77

Ronald M. Paulson, Robert Musil and the Ineffable: Hieroglyph, Myth, Fairy Tale and Sign, Modern Austrian Literature, 18, no. 1 (1985), 104

Gudrun Brokoph-Mauch, ed., Beiträge zur Musil-Kritik, Modern Austrian Literature, 19, no. 1 (1986), 120-21

Rainer Hoffmann, Figuren des Scheins: Studien zum Spachbild und zur Denkform 5eodor Adornos, The German Quarterly, 59, No. 3 (1986), 466-67

Jochen Schmidt, Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens 1750-1945, The Yearbook of the Goethe Society of North America, 4 (1988), 367-70

Burkhardt Lindner, ed.,Walter Benjamin im Kontext, The Germanic Review, 63, No. 3 (1988),149-50

Roland Kany, Mnemosyne als Programm: Geschichte, Erinnerung, und die Andacht zum Unbedeutenden im Werk von Usener,Warburg, und Benjamin, The German Quarterly, 62, No. 2 (1989), 286-87

Avital Ronell, Dictations: On Haunted Writing, The Yearbook of the Goethe Society of North America 5 (1989), 342-5

Heinrich Kaulen, Rettung und Destruktion: Untersuchungen zur Hermeneutik Walter Benjamins,The German Quarterly, 63, No. 2 (1990), 289-90

Dagmar Barnouw, Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity, The German Quarterly, 63, No. 2 (1990), 305-307

Ulrich Fries, Uwe Johnsons Jahrestage, The German Quarterly 65, Nos. 3-4 (1992), 491-93

Ernst Bloch: "Recollections of Walter Benjamin," in Gary Smith, ed., Critical Essays on Walter Benjamin, (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1988), pp. 339-345

Walter Benjamin, “News about Flowers,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, volume II, pp. 155-57

Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, volume II, pp. 694-698

Walter Benjamin, "Antinomies of Allegorical Exegesis," "The Ruin," and "The Dismemberment of Language" from Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Jennings, Doherty, and Levin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media, 2008, pp. 174-91