Images of the liminal: seaside promenades through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project

Kennell, James and Rykalski, Wesley (2010) Images of the liminal: seaside promenades through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. In: Liminal Landscapes: remapping the field, 1-2 Jul 2010, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK.

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Abstract

The Arcades Project is an immense but incomplete and fragmentary work that Walter Benjamin was engaged with from 1927 until his death in 1940. He intended this to be his most significant contribution to the fields of history and theory and many of his late works were generated from the Arcades Project or prompted by issues he encountered whilst working on it.
In 2003 a new and more authoritative translation of the Arcades Project was published, prompting a revival of interest in Benjamin’s historical work and encouraging a number of new interpretations. This project aims to apply the methodological concepts employed by Benjamin to a new area of study and, in so doing, to investigate the value of Benjamin’s work for contemporary social and historical research.
Our project is to take this approach and work on the social meaning of and the histories of the seaside through the promenade; the coastal architectural form that provides a similar focal point for investigations as the arcades of Paris provided for Benjamin.

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