Caesura and Jetztpunkt: Verse Essays after Walter Benjamin

CAESURA AND JETZTPUNKT: VERSE ESSAYS AFTER WALTER BENJAMIN is an extended sequence of verse-essays on the writings of Walter Benjamin, a German-Jewish philosopher, literary critic and cultural theorist of extraordinary brilliance and range whose work has exerted a magnetic appeal for readers in many disciplines, the innovative hybrid of Creative Criticism among them. Its fascination lies partly in the way it strives to find some point of equilibrium between his Brecht-influenced Marxism on the one hand and, on the other, Benjamins marked though ambivalent attraction to textual commentary of an almost Kabbalistic or theologically inflected character. Norris takes a lead-and numerous epigraphs - from short passages in Benjamins texts which give rise to some highly inventive, deeply searching, and formally intricate poetic meditations. Coming at them from various angles - biographical, historical, philosophical, literary, and socio-cultural-he deploys in each case a verse form and rhyme scheme designed to point up further dimensions of Benjamins densely allusive and many-leveled discourse. This text eludes easy classification by combining poetry, poetics, and philosophy of language and doing so, moreover, in a performative mode uniquely suited to a writer like Benjamin who himself very deliberately crossed all manner of generic border-lines.

What People Are Saying

Christopher Norriss poems (or "verse-essays") are self-described as "ventures beyond strict scholarly warrant," an acknowledgment that is sure to be welcomed by Walter Benjamin scholars/enthusiasts as properly in sync with Benjamins own writerly protocols. Indeed, Norris tells us that taking such "hermeneutic license" is "scarcely out of place with a writer of Benjamins highly inventive or creative-critical temperament." Yet . . . from the first poem, "Page-Turner" to the last poem, "Anabasis: Port Bou," Norris masterfully entangles his poetry with not only Benjamins most fruitful themes (history, collecting, experience, language, auras, montage, among countless others) but with the entire cast of modernism and postmodernisms literary and philosophical protagonists. This collection is, appropriately, Benjamins missing suitcase. In it, Norris has pried open a life with such poetic verve that his reader cannot not paint herself into another (less fatalistic) pastel version of Benjamins favorite painting by Paul Klee, "Angel of History" . . . and unabashedly turn around to face a more hopeful future. -Cynthia Haynes, author of The Homesick Phone Book: Addressing Rhetorics in the Age of Perpetual Conflict

About the Author

Christopher Norris is Emeritus Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cardiff. He is the author or editor of more than forty academic books on aspects of philosophy, literature, the history of ideas, politics, and music. Among his chief interests are the poetry and criticism of William Empson and the writings of Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou.

He has also published a number of poetry collections: The Cardinals Dog; For the Tempus-Fugitives; The Matter of Rhyme; A Partial Truth; As Knowing Goes; Hedgehogs: Verse Reflections after Derrida; Damaged Life: Poems after Adornos Minima Moralia; Socrates at Verse; Recalibrating and Other Poems; After Rilke: Renderings, Parodies, Rejoinders and Animadversions; and A Listener and Other Poems about Music. His political verse has appeared in three volumes: The Trouble with Monsters, The Folded Lie, and Convulsions, 2021-2024: A Trusstercluck. A previous verse-collection of his was a Times Literary Supplement "Book of the Year" (Terry Eagletons choice) and he has now become very much involved in the innovative field of Creative Criticism.