Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen
Subtitle: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond
Edition: 1st Touchstone Ed edition
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2001
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 208
ISBN-13: 9780684870199
Subjects: Biography: general; Literature: History & Criticism; Novelists, American; Essays; Biography; United States; Literary Collections; Biography / Autobiography; Literary Criticism; USA; General; Literary; Biography & Autobiography / Literary; Antiquarian booksellers; Texas; American - General; 20th century; Books and reading
First sentence: IN THE summer of 1980, in the Archer City Dairy Queen, while nursing a lime Dr Pepper (a delicacy strictly local, unheard of even in the next Dairy Queen down the road-Olney's, eighteen miles south-but easily obtainable by anyone willing to buy a lime and a Dr Pepper), I opened a book called Illuminations and read Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller," nominally a study of or reflection on the stories of Nikolay Leskov, but really (I came to feel, after several rereadings) an examination, and a profound one, of the growing obsolescence of what might be called practical memory and the consequent diminution of the power of oral narrative in our twentieth-century lives.