Arendt's Criticism of Life

<dc:p>Querying Arendt’s preoccupation with the biography of the literary figures she writes about, this article studies her concept of life and its consequences for her literary criticism. It reads Arendt against the backdrop of Geistesgeschichte, a current prominent in German literary discourse during her university years, works through the role of “life” in theoretical works like the Human Condition, and asks how her biographical criticism operates concretely in her essays on Brecht and Benjamin, in order to make her approach more legible in the context of twenty-first-century debates about methodology in literary studies.</dc:p>