A cynical friend coined the phrase "the voluptuous embrace of impotence" to accurately describe much of the writing on Burma by academics in the humanities. Too often authors write tamely on microtopics as obscure as they are irrelevant. While this style protects against, god forbid, being too "political" it also ensures an author a well-deserved anonymity.

A welcome new exception to this style is Gustaaf Houtman's "Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy," published by the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. The monograph is long, dense, invaluable and free.

Houtman, an anthropologist and scholar of Burmese Buddhism, has turned his attention to the Buddhist dimensions underlying the struggle between Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma's ostensibly Buddhist military regime. Although quoted for her appeals to universal norms of human rights and democracy, Daw
Suu - like the regime - regularly invokes appeals to Buddhist concepts and Burma's history. For a non-Buddhist not from Burma, these arguments over Buddhist fine points can seem as obscure and irrelevant as, well as much of the academic writing about Burma. They are not.

Houtman's book is an invaluable primer in understanding the icons and symbols that Aung San Suu Kyi and the regime seek to identify with in their struggle for power. Houtman's book should be high on the reading list of anyone with a serious interest in Burma's future. For those beginning an interest in Burma, it should be near the start of a reading list (right after any book by Aung San Suu Kyi and 30 minutes reading the regime's state press at: http://www.myanmar.com/nlm).

A leading German critic from the generation of Europeans scarred by the First World War, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) had a writing career marked by deep philosophical insights and tumultuous emotional crises. But until recently, most of his work was unavailable in English; the handful of essays that could be read in English, like "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," were undisputed classics, but the full spectrum of Benjamin's thought remained untapped. That has changed with Harvard University's publication of the multivolume Selected Writings. This second volume covers Benjamin's work from 1927 to 1934, the period in which he established himself as a leading public intellectual, and encompasses a wide variety of literary forms addressing an even wider variety of subject matter. From interviews with André Gide to film reviews of work by Chaplin and Eisenstein, from the autobiographical recollections of "A Berlin Chronicle" to his reflections on the cultural nostalgia for children's literature and toys, Benjamin wrote with perception and unflagging inquisitiveness. The editors have provided a chronological essay, which helps place the assembled writings in the context of Benjamin's life; the collection considered as a whole will undoubtedly be of vital importance to any scholar of modern European philosophy. © Amazon.com

 

Book description

In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practising literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings, covering the years 1927 to 1934, displays the full spectrum of Benjamin's achievements at this pivotal stage in his career. Previously concerned chiefly with literary theory, Benjamin during these years does pioneering work in new areas, from the study of popular culture (a discipline he virtually created) to theories of the media and the visual arts. His writings on the theory of modernity-most of them new to readers of English-develop ideas as important to an understanding of the twentieth century as any contained in his widely anthologised essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility.' This volume brings together previously untranslated writings on major figures such as Brecht, Valry, and Gide, and on subjects ranging from film, radio, and the novel to memory, kitsch, and the theory of language. We find the manifoldly inquisitive Benjamin musing on the new modes of perception opened up by techniques of photographic enlargement and cinematic montage, on the life and work of Goethe at Weimar, on the fascination of old toys and the mysteries of food, and on the allegorical significance of Mickey Mouse. Also included are several of Benjamin's most entertaining radio scripts for a popular audience, as well as some rare and revealing glimpses into a fragmentary autobiography, in the form of diary entries, travel sketches, recollections, and personal meditations.