Walter Benjamin's Literary Aura: A Stylistic and Thematic Analysis of One-Way Street

“Brevity ” epitomizes Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street, an avant-garde text composed entirely of aphorisms. Benjamin's ideal of literary montage involves the utilization of ideas that he refers to as Abfall, or detritus, and rearranging them—preserved in the momentary spontaneity in which they were conceived—in order to create an entirely new meaning. Noteworthy about Benjamin's style is the manner in which the assembly of momentary thoughts and impressions creates, in a literary sense, the artistic aura of authenticity introduced in his seminal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. ” By preserving the form, content, and style of the original thoughts and impressions instead of proposing a thesis, Benjamin succeeds in retaining the unadulterated essence of language as a reflection of a modern and dynamic world of momentary sensual and intellectual impressions. Although these ideas are a mixture of the incomplete, the mundane, the esoteric, and the irrational, Benjamin proves that immediately explicated purposefulness is not a prerequisite for meaning, and that brevity offers the possibility for a multiplicity of interpretations. This paper will encompass the following: 1) a discussion of Benjamin's understanding o