City and Modernity in Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin [electronic resource] : Fragments of Metropolis / by Vincenzo Mele.

1. Introduction: Investigating Postmodernity through Modernity. -- 2. Metropolis as general Form of Modernity -- 3. Georg Simmel's Theory of Knowledge -- 4. Sociological Aesthetic of Modernity.-5. Metropolis, Money and the Style of Modern Life -- 6. Metropolization of Social Life: How is Society Possible? -- 7. What is The Arcades Project? -- 8. Walter Benjamin's Theory of Knowledge -- 9. The Phantasmagoria of Modernity: Benjamin on Commodity Fetishism -- 10. Benjamin and Baudelaire as the lyric poet in the age of mature capitalism -- 11. Metropolis as Tragedy, Metropolis as Trauerspiel -- .

This book reconstructs and compares the social theories of modernity of George Simmel and Walter Benjamin, two classic thinkers in German social thought. The author focuses in on five main topics: the historical-sociological method through which they investigate modernity; how are the concepts of history and society possible; the consequences of modern metropolis on the construction of individual subjectivity; the aestheticization of everyday life caused by the expansion of commodity culture; the female culture as a counter-power to the domination of masculine objective culture. In the decades since Simmel and Benjamin, urban reality has undergone profound changes and we may even question the very existence of the subject of analysis: what is the city, the metropolis in today's context of globalization and capital flows? Simmel's and Benjamin's metropolis has thus become an "endless city", beyond the physical and geographical confines of urban reality.