Category Archives: Modernism

The Angel of History or, Progress (AMST310/HUM485)

From “Theses on History” by Walter Benjamin:

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin 1941, 257–8)

Spring (225)

The Girl Ch. 17 page 72:

I had got desires now. It all broke on my tongue like some wild sweet fruit. As if my bark was breaking in spring, or mama rising in me, telling me how the flesh can die, be beaten and lost. I felt a great root springing down and a great blossom springing up, like my hair sprang out of my skull green, or a terrible root went into the dark with a hundred mouths looking for food.