Introduction : Reading Benjamin / David S. Ferris -- 1. Walter Benjamin and the European avant-garde / Michael Jennings -- 2. Art forms / Jan Mieszkowski -- 3. Language and mimesis in Walter Benjamin's work / Beatrice Hanssen -- 4. Walter Benjamin's concept of cultural history / Howard Caygill -- 5. Benjamin's Modernity / Andrew Benjamin -- 6. Benjamin and psychoanalysis / Sarah Ley Roff -- 7. Benjamin and the ambiguitics of Romanticism / Rebecca Comay -- 8. Body politics : Benjamin's dialectical materialism between Brecht and the Frankfurt School / Rainer Nagele -- 9. Method and time : Benjamin's dialectical images / Max Penksy -- 10. Benjamin's phantasmagoria : the Arcades Project / Margaret Cohen -- 11. Acts of self-portraiture : Benjamin's confessional and literary writings / Gerhard Richter.