Eiland, Howard 1948–

PERSONAL:

Born April 10, 1948, in Huntington, WV; son of Theodore A. (a television executive) and Lillian Eiland; married Julia Prewitt Brown (a professor of English), 1986; children: Matthew, Rudolph. Education: Northwestern University, B.A., 1970; Yale University, M.Phil., 1972, Ph.D., 1974.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Sharon, MA. Office—Literature Faculty, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139. E-mail—eiland@mit.edu.

CAREER:

Yale University, New Haven, CT, assistant professor of English, 1974-76; Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, assistant professor of English, 1976-83; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, lecturer in literature, 1983—.

MEMBER:

Modern Language Association of America.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with David Thorburn, and contributor) John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1979.

(Editor) Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1 (with Michael W. Jennings and Marcus Bullock; also contributor of translation), Belknap Press (Cambridge, MA), 1996, Volume 2 (with Jennings and Gary Smith), Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1999, Volume 3, (with Jennings) Harvard University Press, 2001, Volume 4, Belknap Press, 2003.

Contributor to books, including Critical Essays on Philip Roth, edited by Sanford Pinsker, G.K. Hall (New York, NY), 1982; and Walter Benjamin and Art, edited by Andrew Benjamin, Continuum (London, England), 2004. Contributor of articles and reviews to magazines, including Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, Salmagundi, Telos, Shuffle Boil, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Philosophy and Literature, and Chicago Review.

TRANSLATOR

(With Kevin McLaughlin) Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1999.

(With Joel Golb) Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 2003.

(With others) Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Belknap Press (Cambridge, MA), 2006.

Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, Belknap Press (Cambridge, MA), 2006.

Walter Benjamin, On Hashish, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Howard Eiland once told CA: "I believe John Updike is the most balanced American novelist now writing, equally accomplished in the novel of manners and the novel of ideas, though his achievement in the latter is yet to be fully recognized. I believe that in time he will come to be acknowledged as the major American writer of our era." He further commented: "Heidegger provides a way out of the tangle of ‘modernism,’ though an exceedingly difficult way. His work is still not very well known in the Anglo-American world—for understandable reasons. One of the challenges he presents to us is to understand how profundity of thought can go together with dangerously reactionary political attitudes."

Eiland was the chief translator of, and author of the foreword to, The Arcades Project, a sprawling work by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin was a significant literary and cultural critic; however, his works remain relatively obscure due to the circumstances of his life and death. He was a Jew and a Marxist, living in Germany when the Nazis rose to power. In 1940, believing that the Nazi Gestapo was about to arrest him, he took his own life. Many of his writings were unfinished; others remained unpublished, and others, while published in periodicals of the day, quickly became obscure. During the latter half of the twentieth century, efforts were made to collect Benjamin's scattered work into a cohesive body. His greatest, unfinished work was published and translated into English as The Arcades Project. The title refers to the glass-covered shopping arcades of Paris, the city Benjamin held as the cultural capital of the nineteenth century. The arcades were described by T.J. Clark in the London Review of Books as a "network of dusty covered shopping streets with greenhouse roofs, most of them built in the 1820s, which still dreamed on in the Jazz Age, cluttered with stores specialising in trusses and life-size dolls and used false teeth…. The Surrealists had discovered and celebrated the passages a few years before. ‘Surrealism was born in an arcade,’ Benjamin wrote at the time."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

London Review of Books, June 22, 2000, T.J. Clark, "Reservations of the Marvellous," pp. 3, 5-9.

Times Literary Supplement, April, 2007, Eric Bulson, review of Berlin Childhood around 1900.