Böcker av Jeffrey Mehlman

George Steiner's discussion of Jeffrey Mehlman's writing on Walter Benjamin gives the flavor of Mehlman's writing in Second Thoughts."The arch erudition and playful intelligence of Jeffrey Mehlman's concise jeu d'esprit, Walter Benjamin for Children, sparkle. Mehlman weaves a sequence of associative arabesques, 'intertextually imbricated, psychoanalytically informed,' on the script for two radio programmes for children which Benjamin wrote during 1929-1930. Almost in the style of a magician, Professor Mehlman demonstrates the literally catastrophic substance of Benjamin's tales for children. With a scholastic acuity and wit resembling that of Benjamin himself, Mehlman teases out in the thematic rootedness of catastrophe and fraud the "phantom presence of the motif of a 'false messianism' which flowers, nearly subliminally, in these seemingly innocent broadcasts."

This memoir is less a chronicle of the life of a leading scholar/critic of matters French (and a key figure in the naturalization of French "theory" in English) than a series of differently angled fragments, episodes, each with its attendant surprise, in what one commentator has called his amour vache, his injured and occasionally injurious love, for France and the French.