1A. Levine, Jennings, & Wood – Roundtable on Walter Benjamin

This piece is a roundtable discussion on the Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility” examining its relevance today in our ongoing condition of media change in which attention and distraction are at the forefront of current concerns. The discussion was between Mike Jennings, Professor in the German Department at Princeton University and author of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life; Michael Wood, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University and author of Habits of Distraction; and Thomas Levin, Professor in the German Department at Princeton University and curator and co-author of CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. The discussion was moderated by Daniela Fabricius, Adjunct Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute.