Art, Philosophy, and Truth: A Close Reading of Benjamin's Essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities

This course will be devoted to a close reading of one of the most rewarding, and also most intricate, essays about aesthetics written in the first half of the twentieth century, Benjamin’s 1924 essay on Goethe. Rather than discuss the pertinence of the interpretation Benjamin proposes of Goethe's famous novel, we will focus on the ideas he develops in relation to art and philosophy, and the conceptual distinctions he introduces, such as the distinction between commentary and criticism, or the distinction between an artwork's material content and its truth content.