Introduction: Benjamin and Bakhtin: New Approaches, New Contexts

Abstract

Introduction: Benjamin and Bakhtin: New Approaches, New Contexts ]ohn Docker Subhash ]aireth These essays arose from an international symposium "Adventures of Dialogue : Bakhtin and Benjamin" staged at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, in June 2001. We formed the idea to hold a conference, as the twentieth century ended and the new millennium ushered itself in, on two of modernity's greatest literary and philosophical thinkers, who were born almost at the same time, and in the late 1920s published two of the last century's most challenging, brilliant, speculative works, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and The Origin of German Tragic Drama. We decided to call on the term "Adventures" because, as with "Adventures of Identity: Constructing the Multicultural Subject," a conference organized by John Docker and Gerhard Fischer at the Goethe-Institut in Sydney in 1998, such a title and approach seems to elicit imaginative and adventurous contributions. As with the Goethe-Institut conference, we would aim to include topics and participants from around the world. The "Eurocentric," we hoped, would be thoroughly challenged in our Canberra conference, as it had been in Sydney. In July of 2000 we sent out a call for papers, suggesting a wide range JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 32.3 (Fall 2002): 261-265. Copyright O 2002 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 262 JNT of possible symposium themes—from "Being and Becoming" to "Philosophy and Representation"; from "Vision and Visuality" to "Space, Place, Travel" and "Time"; from "Objects and Things" to "Monotheism and Polytheism." Each of these rubrics implied a diverse subset of possibilities including the individuality of cities; the public sphere; places sacred, uncanny and mystical—pilgrimages, shrines, temples, synagogues, mosques, churches; sea, ships, ship decks and voyages; museums; railway stations; war/peace memorials; absence of memorials; massacre sites; genocide and trauma; inns, taverns, pubs, salons, the tea shop, the coffee shop; geocultural areas—"the Levant," "the Mediterranean," "Africa," "Asia," "the Pacific ," "Europe"; the prison in history; education; cosmopolitanism; postsecularism ; Egyptology; Exodus; the Bible and critical theory; settler-colonialism and religion; Freud's Moses and Monotheism; heresy; the sacred and the ludic; creation stories, etc. In our call for papers we wrote that we "see the symposium as staging intimate multiple conversations between Bakhtin and Benjamin's ideas and theories," and that we would "particularly like offers of papers that entwine discussion of both thinkers, in terms of possible affinities and differences, in a spirit of agonistic respect." We also sought out and encouraged paper givers for the conference outside of Europe and "the West," and were also very interested in papers that might engage with indigenous cultures. We were attracted to ideas for papers that surprised us and that we thought were truly "adventurous"—that might proceed from Bakhtin or Benjamin and explore new areas or motifs or texts or figures, often in almost eccentric or idiosyncratic ways. We hoped such papers would stretch the boundaries, taking Benjamin and Bakhtin away from canonical enclosed treatment of them that we thought was, if not boring, at least restrictive and predictable. In conceiving the symposium, we recognized that Bakhtin remains closely tied to the two sites of Slavic and Literary studies, whereas Benjamin has "traveled" far and wide. One of our aims was to encourage an investigation of Bakhtin and a dialogue with Benjamin that would address the question of influence. Theorists came in from the US, Scotland, Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as the Australian cities of Newcastle, Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra itself. Proceedings were entertainingly visual, with much showing of slides, movie excerpts, photos, postcards. The high intellectual Introduction-. Benjamin and Bakhtin: New Approaches, New Contexts 263 quality was set at the beginning of each day by the keynote speakers Katerina Clark and Rajeev Patke. These were our noble bookends, investigating and extending current knowledge and research into our major figures. Then younger scholars took over, glancing off Bakhtin and Benjamin to give witty, unusual, innovative talks. The well known cultural theorist and public intellectual Meaghan Morris arrestingly summed up proceedings at the end. There were no parallel sessions, so rapport and camaraderie easily developed over the two days. There was much fun and laughter. There...