Benjamin Bennett

Secular Millenialism: The Train of Aesthetics from Baumgarten and Kant to Walt Disney and Hitler by Benjamin Bennett combines the perspectives of intellectual history, literary history, and political

Treating the work of Sappho, Goethe, Blake, Holderlin, Verlaine, George, Morike, and Yeats in detail, Benjamin Bennett makes the provocative argument that the nature of lyric poetry in the West has an

The concept of secular millennialism summarizes a crucial point made by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism: that twentieth-century totalitarian movements, in Nazi Germany and in the Sovie

This book focuses on Hugo von Hofmannsthal's intense, lifelong concentration upon a single cohesive set of poetic, philosophical and ethical concerns, a quality of his work which has been neglected in the bulk of existing scholarship. Professor Bennett examines Hofmannsthal's work in the context of literary theory and the history of philosophy, referring especially to Nietzsche, German Idealism and the poetics of German Classicism. He identifies three principal areas of concern to Hofmannsthal: the theory of genre, the question of the role of literature in society and the search for a fruitful response to the problem of the historical development of culture. The argument proceeds by way of detailed interpretation of texts, including Der Tor und der Tod, the Chandos letter, Ariadne auf Naxos, Der Schwierige, Das Salzburger Grosse Welttheater and Der Turm.

Reading is good for us. The reading of literature, we are told, enlarges our horizons, extends our experience beyond our own lives. But the moral and political dangers that attend the association of

All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater is the first book to consider why, in the Western tradition (and only in the Western tradition), theatrical drama is regarded as its own literary or poetic type, w

While countless books have been written on Jesus, Explaining Jesus integrates insights from across the disciplines, including social and natural sciences. This book explores the possibilities of a sec

In Death in Documentaries: The Memento Mori Experience, Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter suggests that documentaries are an especially apt form of contemporary memento mori; that is, documentaries offer tra