En este texto proveemos algunas claves para comprender el críptico ensayo “Karl Kraus” de Walter Benjamin. Para esto, destacamos la importancia de Kraus para la crítica periodística y política que le ...interesaba a Benjamin, introducimos al lector en las tres partes del ensayo y hacemos una breve reflexión sobre la construcción del concepto de crítica en Benjamin a partir de la obra de Kraus.
This paper considers a key text in the field of Cultural Studies for its relevance to questions about the identity of knowledge in education. The concept of ‘aura’ arises as being of special ...significance in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ as a way of understanding the change that occurs to art when mass reproduction becomes both technologically possible and industrially realised. Aura seems to signify something of the symbolic halo generated by objects of special significance that is both powerful and indefinite. This paper argues that aura is in fact the necessary property of symbolic representation—and that it attaches as much to the figure of Walter Benjamin as it does to any canonical work of art. But the paper also claims that Benjamin's argument about the significance of popular forms of art—particularly photography and film—can be updated and applied to critical questions about the established order of knowledge in education. This is particularly relevant to those curriculum domains where specific objects—texts, for example—are invested with powerful auras. It may also be applicable to all forms of established knowledge and curricula.
In 2003, anthropologist and poet Michael Jackson went to French Catalonia with the intention of crossing the Pyrenees on the anniversary of Walter Benjamin's fateful journey on 25-26 September 1940. ...Retracing Benjamin's steps over a tortuous terrain of vineyards, stony paths and Mediterranean maquis, Jackson meditates on the life and work of the great twentieth-century philosopher, critical theorist, and essayist, as well as on the ways that events beyond our control or comprehension impact on and shape the course of our individual journeys through life.
This Master's thesis examines the ways in which literature undoes the dividing line between Human and Animal that is at the core of the anthropocentric construction of human identity. More ...specifically, the aim of this project is to provide a reading of four of Kafka's stories: "A Report to an Academy" (1917), "Investigations of a Dog" (1931), "Josephine, the Singer, or the Mouse Folk" (1924), and "A Crossbreed" (1931). My approach is rooted in the field of literary animal studies and aligned with poststructuralist and deconstructionist thinking about animals present in the work of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. I put forth the argument that the animal figures in these four short stories challenge human-centered thought by refusing to comply with common assumptions about the capabilities and identity of animals. The literary analysis focuses on three key elements of anthropocentric notions of species identity: visual encounters as moments of species awareness, language as a dominant criteria for human exceptionalism, and the body as a site of identity formation.
Ana Pérez López, profesora de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, miembro de la Gesellschaft für Exilforschung y editora de esta antología de textos literarios y políticos sobre el exilio alemán, ...nos guía con gran maestría a través de dicha reflexión. Parte de los autores/as de muchos de dichos fragmentos son bien conocidos en nuestro país, pero la editora del volumen no ha dudado en incluir firmas mucho menos conocidas (Theodor Franz Csokor, Alfred Kantorowicz, Theodor Balk, Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss, Fritz Brügel, Hermann Budzislawski entre otros) en aras de conformar un panorama global y significativo del exilio. Con muy buen criterio la editora introduce sin embargo bloques más específicos, de gran interés literario: así por ejemplo, los problemas del escritor en el exilio, en los que se trata entre otras la dificultad de la elección de la lengua literaria y la memoria cultural; el sentido de la existencia en el exilio; una selección del intercambio epistolar relativo a la toma de posición de Thomas Mann en el conflicto; y finalmente una colección de fragmentos sobre diferentes facetas de la implicación de autores exiliados en la Guerra Civil Española.
This article pursues the possibility of a non-reified thinking in the act of "rescuing" through critique. If the objective of such thinking were to rescue something without thereby becoming ...affirmative, to retain something that is about to disappear for good without thereby becoming an instrument of apologia for the status quo, then what kind of relationship can be imagined to connect the sphere of vigilant thought, along with the critical writing that it sponsors, to the nonaffirmative rescuing of its elusive and nonself-identical objects? A reconsideration of the critical dialogue between Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, in which the concept of "rescuing" plays a crucial role, along with a close reading of key passages from works including The Arcades Project and Negative Dialectics, provides significant insights into the centrality and difficulty of this question, both for the Frankfurt School and for critical thought more generally. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Perloff discusses Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project. The juxtapositions, cuts, links, shift in register, framing devices and visual markings produce a poetic text that is paradigmatic for ...contemporary poetics.
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.
PDF
