The following quote comes from Christopher Rollason's The Passageways of Paris: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and Contemporary Cultural Debate in the West:

If we are to seek Benjamin's traces in today's Western society in a more general sense, we may conclude that his true inheritors are in fact not the McLuhanite high priests of the image and detractors of the book, nor those who would drive high culture out of universities in the name of mass culture. Nor are they the deconstructionists and postmodernist theorists who, to quote the dissident US academic Morris Berman from his polemical book of 2000 The Twilight of American Culture, promote "a philosophy of despair masquerading as radical intellectual chic", while generations of students are taught that canonic literature "has no intrinsic meaning and is nothing more than the cultural expression of a wealthy class of dead, white, 'colonialist' males" - at a time when, in today's officially literate US society, "we cannot expect to make a mythological allusion any more, or use a foreign phrase, or refer to a famous historical event or literary character, and still be understood by more than a tiny handful of people". [61] Benjamin should in no way be held responsible for any such cultural wasteland of semi-literacy and half-baked dogma. His authentic heirs are, rather, those cultural critics who have developed and systematised his dynamic concept of modernity, or else pursued his strategy of taking up stray objects from popular culture and coaxing out their wider cultural significance.

Rollason mentions US academic, Marshall Berman the author of All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Eric Lott, lecturer at the University of Virginia and author of the study Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1995), and the writings of American essayists Greil Marcus.