Literary criticism in the Thirties had a number of branches. Edmund Wilson published “Axel’s Castle” in 1931. It was a book that compared Imagist poetry to the poetry that came before. It was followed in 1941 by “The Wound and the Bow”, which was a Freudian interpretation of the Modernist literature of his time, and in 1943 he published “To the Finland Station”, which was an assessment of Marxist writers. Wilson was less driven by ideology than by the critical project itself, which was to get the hang of what an author was saying, whatever was the subject matter or the relevant theory. William Empson, on the other hand, had a consistent point of view. He published “Seven Types of Ambiguity” in 1930 and “Some Versions of Pastoral” in 1935. In the first book, he carefully took apart the idea of simile and metaphor so as to establish the resources language provided to a writer. In the second book, he reduced literature to its conventionalized genres, so that the Gothic romance was a form of the pastoral, a form that stretched back to Vergil and beyond. Literary language and literary form were what made literature work. Walter Benjamin, for his part, had a Marxist interpretation of literature that was perhaps best realized in his “The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, published in 1936. This last has remained remarkably influential. Both Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss took it seriously as the way to understand art. I want to look at what Benjamin proposes in this very short book of his, why I think it is so imperfect, and compare it to other works of aesthetics which seem to me to get the relation between art and modernity more correctly.