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Howard Eiland
Lecturer  .  Office: 14N-407 .  PBX: 617-253-3581  .  Email: eiland@mit.edu

Howard Eiland Research Interests: Twentieth-century literature and philosophy, critical theory, film, jazz

Howard Eiland has been involved since the late nineteen-eighties with the multi-volume Harvard University Press edition of the works of Walter Benjamin, an influential German writer who died in 1940 while in flight from the Nazis. He co-edited three volumes of Benjamin's Selected Writings and co-translated Benjamin's massive Arcades Project, and he has also translated Benjamin's Berlin Childhood around 1900 and his On Hashish. His recent publications include work on film and jazz. He is presently collaborating on a biography of Benjamin.

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Editions

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vols. 2-4
Harvard University Press, 1999-2003
with Michael Jennings and Gary Smith

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Translations

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
Harvard University Press, 1999
with Kevin McLaughlin

Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900
Harvard University Press, 2006

Walter Benjamin, On Hashish
Harvard University Press, 2006

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Selected Articles

"Bellow's Crankiness," Chicago Review (Spring 1981): 92-107.

"Heidegger's Etymological Web," boundary 2 (Winter 1982): 39-58.

"Beyond Psychology: Heidegger on Nietzsche," The Kenyon Review (Winter 1984): 74-86.

"Nietzsche's Jew," Salmagundi (Winter-Spring 1985): 104-117.

"The Novel in the Age of Terminal Paradoxes," The Gettysburg Review (Autumn 1988): 708-722.

"The Pedagogy of Shadow: Heidegger and Plato," boundary 2 (Winter-Spring 1989): 13-39.

"Jazz Notes," Shuffle Boil (Winter 2003): 3-9.

"Reception in Distraction," boundary 2 (Spring 2003): 51-66. Reprinted in Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Continuum, 2005): 3-13.

"Notes on Film," Telos (Spring 2005): 141-164.

"Notes on Eric Dolphy," Shuffle Boil (Summer 2006): 51-59.

"Superimposition in Benjamin's Arcades Project," Telos (forthcoming).

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Classes Taught

21L.002 Foundations of Western Culture

21L.003 Introduction to Fiction

21L.004 Reading Poetry

21L.009 Shakespeare

21L.011 The Film Experience

21L.421 Comedy

21L.435 Literature and Film

21L.472 Major European Novels

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