The Philology of Life - Walter Benjamin's Critical Program

The Philology of Life retraces the outlines of the philological project developed by Walter Benjamin in his early essays on H-lderlin, the Romantics, and Goethe. This philological program, McLaughlin shows, provides the methodological key to Benjamin-s work as a whole.
According to Benjamin, German literary history in the period roughly following the first World War was part of a wider -crisis of historical experience--a life crisis to which Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) had instructively but insufficiently responded. Benjamin-s literary critical struggle during these years consisted in developing a philology of literary historical experience and of life that is rooted in an encounter with a written image.
The fundamental importance of this -philological- method in Benjamin-s work seems not to have been recognized by his contemporary readers, including Theodor Adorno who considered the approach to be lacking in dialectical rigor. This facet of Benja