Moscow - Berlin - Paris: Walter Benjamin's intercultural spaces of comparison
<p>The intellectual Walter Benjamin (1892–1840) continues to attract huge attention across different disciplines. And yet very little scholarly attention has been paid to the formative years of his journalism in the 1920s and the question of how his engagement with both (Soviet) Russian and Fr...
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| Language: | German French English Russian |
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2024
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| Summary: | <p>The intellectual Walter Benjamin (1892–1840) continues to attract huge attention across different disciplines. And yet very little scholarly attention has been paid to the formative years of his journalism in the 1920s and the question of how his engagement with both (Soviet) Russian and French cultures mutually informed each other in his writings. This project thus unpacks how Benjamin’s intercultural experiences and networks – his trips to both France and the USSR and his attempt to establish himself as a leading journalistic expert on both cultures – shaped his fundamental approach to literary criticism, cultural theory and history, and his wider understanding of the role of the intellectual in Europe. What he proclaimed as a ‘neue Optik’ after having returned from Moscow subsequently induces second-order reflections on national or cultural self-imaginaries. Rather than identifying with one particular culture or method, Benjamin situates himself between different journalistic and intellectual practices, on which he tries to shed light by comparing them to each other. His evolving politics of criticism thus can illustrate how to re-read the critical potential of intercultural multiperspectivity or reflexivity.</p>
<p>To do so, this research engages with a variety of archival material, reintroducing different figures, institutions and media from Benjamin’s orbit that have remained largely neglected: various Russian, French and German journals and associated emerging visual culture and infographic material; Benjamin’s contribution to the <em>Great Soviet Encyclopaedia</em>; Western travelogues on the USSR; friendship societies and cultural as well as academic mediators. Bringing together sources from across Europe not only interrogates disciplinary blind spots in Benjamin reception, but also inscribes Benjamin’s thought into an entangled intellectual European history. More generally, this project may thus reflect on the tension between the local and a transnational perspective for literature, literary criticism, and literary historiography of the interwar period.</p> |
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