Taking the music of NEU! as its object and Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" as its theoretical touchstone, this paper performs an analysis of NEU!'s music and ...its contribution to the formation of a new German identity in the early 1970s. The paper concludes that, in their use of the skeletal motorik pulse of Krautrock and their ability to engender a critical positionality in the listener, NEU! produce a rubble music that takes the best from the German past and reassembles it into a roadmap for a new way forward.
Appearances is a one-act memory play with a focus on temporality, language deficiencies, and allegorical depictions of the ambiguous relationships between men and women. Using dramatic techniques ...this autobiographically based play is a complex blend of doubled actors, stage directions, and surrealistic depictions of time reflecting the characteristics of absurdist plays. Using such devices creates a pastiche of female degradation, effacement, and feelings of worthlessness inspired by realistic depictions of male harassment. Elements such as the inadequacy of language, the role of autobiography, and the Cubist depiction of temporality performed with non-verbal motifs and recursive tendencies reveal a woman’s existential woes and eventual escape from a literal and metaphorical prison. Lydia Davis, Walter Benjamin, Lina Perkins Wilder, and other critics, along with playwrights including Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller provide theory, criticism, and inspiration to warrant this story’s irrefutable reliance on stage action for adequate portrayal and impact. Depictions of the frustrations, fears, absurdities, and deceptions that are acted out in Appearances disclose a quest for acceptance and authenticity in the characters’ relationships. Appearances strives to highlight the multitude of issues that arise from problems facing women, youth, and on a larger meta-theatrical level, the inadequacy of human dependence on language as a means of communicating these problems among one another and to a larger audience.
Nick Peim has recently revisited the work of Walter Benjamin; specifically his famous essay on art and mechanical reproduction. In this reply, I too draw upon the inspiration of Benjamin to extend ...the argument to the question of experience and what might count as knowledge, both in a philosophical sense and also in terms of the curriculum. To exemplify my argument I draw upon the topics of prostitution, gambling and the urban. They were all central to Benjamin's unfinished work ‘The Arcades Project’.
Anime Music Videos (AMVs) are transformative works that provide channels of communication between the viewer and the viewed. The editors who make AMVs have distinct communities built on the evolution ...of anime conventions in the United States but have prospered and transformed globally. In the performance of technology, AMV editors find ways of using mass-mediated texts to express themselves, to convey emotions, and to communicate social messages. They make new associations by combining materials and display these associations in sophisticated ways on social forums like the Internet and anime conventions. The associations are interpretive and articulate how storytelling, rather than a fixed and linear one-way flow, is nonlinear, a negotiation between the storytelling performer and audience.
The "Flâneur" in Exile EDMOND, JACOB
Comparative literature,
10/2010, Volume:
62, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this essay, I argue that the flaneur in exile addresses and offers an alternative to the endless oscillation between sameness and difference that bedevils contemporary approaches to comparative ...literature. I use the phrase flaneur in exile to refer to the encounter between a paradigmatic figure of European modernity, the flaneur, and contemporary Chinese poetry, in particular the poetic prose cycle "Guihua" ... ("Ghost Speech/Lies") written by Chinese poet Yang Lian ... during his exile in Auckland, New Zealand, after June Fourth 1989. Emerging out of the relationship between Europe and non-Europe and associated with Walter Benjamin's dialectical image, the figure of the flaneur furnishes a comparative approach based on collision, encounter, and touch, rather than the mimetic, vision-based models of comparison that claim equivalence or commensurability. I detect a similar comparative poetics in the mythologized encounter between Chinese poet Duoduo ... and Charles Baudelaire's "Le soleil" in the early 1970s. This encounter underscores the double movement of a text towards and beyond its engagement with the particularities of its own space and time and suggests the flaneur as a figure for this movement. I extend this implicit comparative poetics by superimposing Baudelaire and Benjamin onto contemporary Chinese poetry to explore the subsequent elaboration and negation of the figure in 1980s xungen, or "root seeking," writing and especially in Yang's work in exile. Reading Yang's walker in the city in relation to the figure of the fl...neur, I show how his exilic writing dramatizes the problem of spatial, temporal, and linguistic dislocation in exile, modernity, and comparison. Whether in Benjamin's reading of Baudelaire, Duoduo's encounter with Baudelaire, Yang's exilic writing, or my reading of each through the flaneur, touch stands as a figure for, and embodiment of, a comparative poetics that deploys a flaneur-like hypersensitivity to the duality of language to bring places and times into encounter, acknowledging their mutually constituting and irreconcilable, mutually eclipsing otherness. The flaneur in exile thus embodies a comparative poetics resistant to generalizing thinking but insistent on bringing places and times into contact and acknowledging the constitutive role that such moments of encounter play in modern and contemporary literature and in modernity at large. (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae/symbols omitted.)
The mythical figure of the labyrinth is often echoed in twentieth century artistic practices. First, it is called upon by artits who wish to introduce a participative dimension in the way the work of ...art will be apprehended. The creators of Dylaby - a group creation subtitled « A Dynamic Labyrinth » - turn a full museum into a maze, whereby they upset the visitors' habits of perception and cognition. After they, too, had created labyrinthic routes (Labyrinth, 1963 ; Labyrinth II, 1964), the members of the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel (Research Group on Visual Art) carry on with the questioning of the traditional viewer-work-of-art relationship by going outside museums, inviting citizens to envision Paris as a beyond-scale labyrinth (One Day in the Street, 1966). The myth of the labyrinth is thus reconsidered through works - whether playful or disturbing - of visual artists whose material is the very city. Posing as a Theseus groping for the way out (Stanley Brouwn) or a Minotaur on the alert (Vito Acconci) or again as an Ariadne weaving a thread destined to benumbed, sleep-walking and habit-ridden passers-by (Francis Alÿs), these artists show that fiction and fables can always be reachable behind the tame appearance of reality. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Notas sobre narração e experiência em Walter Benjamin Wagner de Avila Quevedo
Anuário de literatura : publicação do Curso de Pós-Graduação em Letras, Literatura Brasileira e Teoria Literária,
12/2008, Volume:
13, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The aim of this text is to explain some classical´s writings on Walter Benjamin´s concept of experience (Erfahrung) as it is related to those of narrative (Erzählung) and memory.
"Die Schriften Walter Benjamins stellen ein unvergleichlich aufschlussreiches Repertoire für das Studium von Kritik bereit. Sie zeigen, dass sich Kritik, sei es die der Gesellschaft, des Rechts oder ...der Kunst, nicht in einem Urteil nach etablierten Kriterien erschöpft. Benjamin erzielt kritische Effekte mit Hilfe von unerwarteten Zusammenstellungen oder genealogischen Rekonstruktionen, die den geläufigen Kriterien der Beurteilung nicht einfach folgen und gerade dadurch die Eigentümlichkeiten der betrachteten Gegenstände unterscheiden und erkennen lassen. Kritik löst dabei eine Krise der habitualisierten Denkweisen aus und sorgt für eine Wiederbelebung der Empfindsamkeit ihres Rezipienten. Den mäeutischen Wirkungen, Dynamiken und Strategien der Kritik hat Benjamin zahlreiche, wenngleich fragmentarisch gebliebene Überlegungen gewidmet. Diese systematisch zu entfalten, wie der Autor in seiner Untersuchung vorschlägt, eröffnet neue Wege in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Berliner Denker. Zum einen wird ein kontinuierliches Grundanliegen der intellektuellen Tätigkeit Benjamins ersichtlich, was einen Schlüssel für die Interpretation einzelner Teile seines Oeuvres - Jugendschriften, Erkenntnistheorie, politische, Sprach- und Geschichtsphilosophie - sowie der Entwicklung seines Gesamtwerks an die Hand gibt. Zum anderen lässt sich ein theoretischer Ertrag herauspräparieren, mit dem innovativ in die gegenwärtige philosophische Debatte über die Formen der Kritik eingegriffen werden kann." (Verlagsangabe).
In world literature, the penal colony theme obviously has powerful ethical and political implications. Among the texts dealing with this theme are Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” A. Solzhenitsyn’s
The ...Gulag Archipelago
and Richard Flanagan’s
Gould’s Book of Fish
. This essay first looks at the history of the sublime object—Gould’s fish—in relation to Foucault’s critique of “technologies of the self” and “regime of truth.” Then, in the light of Benjamin’s concept of history and Agamben’s notion of “bare life,” the author argues that Flanagan’s diagnosis of progress in the modernity project—his use of panopticonism, the construction of a railroad and the Great Mahjong Hall in colonial Tasmania as symbols of modernization—offers us a window onto the past through which we might redirect the future. Based on a materialist view of the change that Flanagan anticipates in colonial Tasmanian social life, in its discussion of the questions of history and modernity—a colonial-imperial British modernity and a “glocal” modernity in Tasmania—this essay follows Benjamin in rethinking the boundary(-crossing) between world literature and national literature.
PDF
