walter benjamin’s calderón: literary criticism and the baroque

Why did philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin say that Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-81) was the virtual subject of his rejected Habilitation thesis on German baroque drama, written in 1925 and published in 1928 as Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama)? Based on Benjamin’s early writings about Baroque drama, Origin, and his letters to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who helped him publish the text, in this monograph Jacobo de Camps reconstructs the unlikely dialogue between Calderón’s theatre and Benjamin’s thesis and offers a new perspective on current debates about the reading experience, literary criticism, and Spanish baroque drama.

Jacobo de Camps is AHRC Postdoctoral Researcher in the Humanities at the University of Oxford.