Benjamin Read Research Articles

El feliz ingenio neomexicano: Felipe M. Chacón and Poesía y prosa by Anna M. Nogar and A. Gabriel Meléndez

Reviewed by: El feliz ingenio neomexicano: Felipe M. Chacón and Poesía y prosa by Anna M. Nogar and A. Gabriel Meléndez Juan M. Gallegos Anna M. Nogar and A. Gabriel Meléndez, El feliz ingenio neomexicano: Felipe M. Chacón and Poesía y prosa. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2021. 445 pp. Hardcover, $75; e-book, $75. In El feliz ingenio neomexicano: Felipe M. Chacón and Poesía y prosa editors and translators Anna M. Nogar and A. Gabriel Meléndez recover the written works of noted neomexicano author, publisher, and journalist Felipe M. Chacón. Chacón, a member of the esteemed New Mexican Chacón family, carved out a historical presence during New Mexico’s Territorial Period and the early years of New Mexico’s statehood through his contributions as a journalist, including his time as editor at Spanish-language newspapers like La Voz del Pueblo. A recent addition to the Pasó Por Aquí series published by the University of New Mexico Press, which has spearheaded efforts to recover New Mexico’s unrecognized literary heritage, the book recognizes the work produced by a member of a historically unaccounted for population whose literary production has been relegated to largely unexplored archives. [End Page 82] The book is organized into five sections: both editors’ introductions, an explanation of the translation process, the Spanish transcription of Chacón’s writing, the English translation, and an index. Each scholar wrote separate introductions to the book, with Nogar “examining the aesthetic and creative dimensions” of Chacón’s writing and Meléndez “adding to the sociohistorical understanding of Chacón as an author and of Poesía y prosa as a publication” (5). The appendix is a short one with images of Chacón, selected published poems, and the cover of the original edition of Poesía y prosa. At the core of Nogar and Meléndez’s book is Chacón’s Poesía y prosa. Chacón’s book is divided into four primary parts: a prologue written by New Mexico historian Benjamin Read, and three chapters of poems and prose. While touching on a number of topics and providing a short biography, Read defends Chacón’s decision to write in Spanish. One poem in particular, “In Mexico,” written in Spanish and English, is of particular interest to both Read and Nogar, who argue that Chacón uses his bilingualism to speak to a bilingual population and “to critique Anglo incursion into New Mexico, to comment about the imposition of social conditions and political dynamics onto nuevomexicanos, and to poke fun at those who would demand that nuevomexicanos speak English, while they themselves do not learn the dominant community language, Spanish” (Nogar 31–32). Poetry serves as the dominant genre with sixty of seventy-one selections being original poetry. The poetry’s content runs a gamut of topics, including the personal and the political. Poems like “A Mi Hija, Herminia” and “A Mi Hijo, Felipe” capture a more intimate side of Chacón, while his political poems like “To the Homeland” reflect topics such as his pride in being an American. A short story, a novellete, and a selection that is perhaps a piece of creative nonfiction are the only examples of Chacón’s prose in the book. In addition to his original poetry, Chacón includes translations of poets like Byron, Dryden, Longfellow, and his uncle, Pedro C. Chacón. The book can be seen as a companion to or a continuation of Meléndez and Francisco Lomelís’s work in The Writings of Eusebio Chacón (2012), which collects the writing of Chacón’s cousin, Eusebio [End Page 83] Chacón. Considering the similarities between the two books, this book is highly recommended for those who are familiar with Meléndez and Lomelís’s work. Overall, El feliz ingenion neomexicano opens new avenues of research for those studying the historical literacies of neomexicanos, the Southwest, and Latinxs, whether these literacies are framed by sociocultural, historical, or literary frameworks. It fills an enormous gap in Latinx literary studies, and in many ways serves as a call for the recovery...

The Midnight Hour by Benjamin Read

The Midnight Hour by Benjamin Read

Cormac McCarthy's Allegories of Fragmentation

Abstract For Walter Benjamin, in the Origin of German Tragic Drama, the baroque tragedies of counter-reformation Germany represented a new kind of allegory: the traditional scripture-inflected tropes of catastrophe and melancholy were now used as a way of allegorizing the trauma of a country riven by religious wars and violent dynastic conflict. The use of the classical trope of the ruined church or castle, for example, finds a correlate in the pervasive feeling of uncertainty and impermanence brought about by the Thirty Years War. In this constant state of emergency, to use Benjamin's term for seemingly irremediable political crisis, a materially felt melancholy begins to permeate everything. It is this concern in Benjamin—in which allegorical tragedy, shorn of its providential dimension, encounters history—that I link with certain themes in Cormac McCarthy's novels of the Southwest, particularly, the recursive use of ruined buildings, desiccated landscapes, broken bodies, and broken minds that scar All the Pretty Horses (1992) and The Crossing (1994), the first two novels of the Border Trilogy. The primary assertion is that Benjamin's reading of the mourning drama finds a correlate in McCarthy's allegories of fragmentation.

Commonplaces: The Poetics of African Atlantic Postromantics

Commonplaces: The Poetics of African Atlantic Postromantics

Poets as Readers in Nineteenth-Century France: Critical Reflections. Edited by Joseph Acquisto, Adrianna M. Paliyenko, and Catherine Witt

Long before Mme Rimbaud implored Georges Izambard not to let her son read anything more by Victor Hugo, there was great interest in what poets (and some future poets) read: for the potential influence of external reading on their own writing; for the presence in their poems of destinataires (ideal readers and others); and for the reverse-engineering of their understanding of the act of reading, rendered in new verses. Drawing on recent studies of literacy rates, readership trends, and book publishing, this volume’s twelve essays focus on individual case studies that illustrate many of the threads connecting poets to their readers. Whilst pushing beyond literary studies to consider the political, social, and cultural dimensions of poetic acts, this solid and coherent collection also offers a reminder of the breadth and evolution of French poetry from 1830 to 1900, its divergent approaches, and its cast of characters. If the usual suspects are certainly here — as Rosemary Lloyd’s opening essay demonstrates, it’s hard to imagine discussing nineteenth-century French poets as readers without Mallarmé taking centre stage — there are also important essays on less obvious writers, such as E. S. Burt’s insightful analysis of Nerval’s ‘Les Nuits d’Octobre’ and Aimée Boutin’s on Amable Tastu writing on (and reading) Shelley. Not surprisingly, Baudelaire also plays a pivotal role: as Timothy Raser deftly shows, he is one of the sources of three concurrent and related poems about Cythera; for Catherine Witt, he provides a fount of satire and critique in ‘Au lecteur’; Joseph Acquisto shows how his true colours come to light as Gautier describes them, albeit unwittingly and via Hawthorne; and Helen Abbott argues for a new appreciation of his work made possible by cross-aesthetic renderings. Poets whom we could call ‘Lecteurs maudits’ are here, too, explicated in strong analyses by Robert St. Clair (Rimbaud and Verlaine) and Nicolas Valazza (Verlaine and Coppée), before three unrelated but no less compelling chapters: by Adrianna M. Paliyenko on Malvina Blanchecotte and Louise Ackermann as poets, readers, and critics; by David Evans on the tensions between poetry’s rich oral/aural tradition and the increasing dominance of the printed word; and by Kevin Newmark on (Benjamin reading) Valéry reading Baudelaire (and Mallarmé). This volume raises fundamental questions about poetry as performance and as phenomenon, about the aesthetics of creation, and about the (real and perceived) relationships between writing and reading, poet and reader of poetry, and poetry’s aural traditions and its transposition into written form. Mme Rimbaud might have been right to try to keep dangerous texts out of young Arthur’s hands; readers of French poetry ever since have been grateful to Izambard for not heeding the request of a meddling parent. We owe just as much gratitude to this volume’s contributors for their thoughtful considerations of the complex relationship between reading and writing poetry, with all its perils and riches.

Kant's Theory of Experience at the End of the War: Scholem and Benjamin Read Cohen A Commentary

Kant's Theory of Experience at the End of the War: Scholem and Benjamin Read Cohen A Commentary

Walter Benjamin und das Wiener Judentum zwischen 1900 und 1938 (review)

Reviewed by: Walter Benjamin und das Wiener Judentum zwischen 1900 und 1938 Esther Leslie Walter Benjamin und das Wiener Judentum zwischen 1900 und 1938, edited by Sascha Kirchner, Vivian Liska, Karl Solibakke, and Bernd Witte. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009. 160 pp. 24.80 Euro. There are so many books on Walter Benjamin. One reason for this is his extraordinary range of interests (from literature to mass media to philosophy of history to theology to politics). He was never bound to any one period of time, as a specialist in Romanticism or the Baroque period or ancient civilizations might be. And he was not tied to one place, either in terms of his area of research—French littérateurs, German artists and scientists, Russian political artists, Italian town planners and more fascinated him—or in terms of his habitat, for this Berliner moved across Europe, from Capri to Denmark, Moscow to Paris, in search of sustenance and a home. It is for these reasons that many volumes can be devoted to thematic studies of Benjamin in relation to objects, ideologies, epochs, or places. As Volker Barth states in his essay on memory and history in Benjamin, in the volume under review, "Bei Benjamin ist alles Fragment" ("In Benjamin, all is fragmentary") (p.135). This fragmentary nature of the texts allows them to be parcelled out in many different contexts. Walter Benjamin und das Wiener Judentum zwischen 1900 und 1938, written in German, shines its scholarly lights on the relationship of Benjamin to Vienna and, in particular, Viennese Jewry from 1900 to 1938. It [End Page 171] is not an obvious choice of theme. The relationship of Benjamin to Jewishness is, of course, well-explored, under the direction mainly of his friend Gershom Scholem. But it is the location of Vienna that is more intriguing here and foregrounded in the volume. Benjamin spent little time in Austria. His main bond to the city was Leon Kellner, a prominent Zionist and English literary scholar, who was his father-in-law from 1917 to 1930 and with whom he and his wife Dora stayed from December 1919 to March 1920. However, things often make sense once someone has conjured their reality into being—and the volume persuades that Benjamin had a strong connection to Vienna and Viennese Jewry, in particular through the figures of Sigmund Freud (whose work Benjamin cited at various points) and the less well-known satirist and journalist Karl Kraus (on whom Benjamin wrote an enigmatic essay). The volume under review is the fifth in a series of Benjamin-Blätter—Benjamin-Pages—and it originated in March 2007 in a conference on Vienna and Jewish experience 1900-1938, where the International Walter Benjamin Society organized a strand. The essays have each more or less to do with Benjamin or figures in Viennese Jewry in tandem. Each is of interest in its own right and the scholarly level is high, as is the accessibility of the prose. There is no particular ordering to them, apart from the last essay, a dark interruption and cessation, in which Peter Weibel starkly outlines the events of Anschluss and in particular, its fatal impact on the Vienna School of philosophy. Bernd Witte's contribution, on "Feuilletonismus. Benjamin, Kraus, Heine," focuses on Benjamin's reading of Kraus in relation to linguistic theory, which turns out in some regards, according to Witte, to be a mis-reading or an underdeveloped theory. Feuilleton cannot do what Benjamin hopes it might. The contested aspect for Witte is what quotation actually does. It is quotation that Karl Ivan Solibbake evokes in his essay on Mahler, in which Mahler's citing of other music is set in parallel with Benjamin's veneration of the historical and political force of the quotation ripped from context. Trabert's piece on Schoenberg does not consider Benjamin, but is a reflection on the theme of "the chosen" and Jewish culture in Vienna. It notes in passing that the secularist Freud once described himself in the foll wing words: "My parents were Jews, and I have remained a Jew too." Anja Lemke covers the under-researched topic of Freud and Benjamin, whereby the city...

TheFlâneurin Exile

In this essay, I argue that the flâneur 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 flâneur in exile to refer to the encounter between a paradigmatic figure of European modernity, the flâneur, 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 flâneur 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 flâneur 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 flâneur, 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 flâneur, touch stands as a figure for, and embodiment of, a comparative poetics that deploys a flâneur-like hypersensitivity to the duality of language to bring places and times into encounter, acknowledging their mutually constituting and irreconcilable, mutually eclipsing otherness. The flâneur 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.

Walter Benjamin and Romanticism by Beatrice Hanssen , Andrew Benjamin The Hieroglyph of Tradition: Freud, Benjamin, Gadamer, Novalis, Kant by Angelika Rauch (review)

752 Reviews Walter Benjamin and Romanticism. Ed. by Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Ben? jamin. New York and London: Continuum. 2002. viii+ 246 pp. $33.95. ISBN 0-8264-6021-6. The Hieroglyph of Tradition: Freud, Benjamin, Gadamer, Novalis, Kant. By Angelika Rauch. Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associ? ated University Presses. 2000. 249 pp. $45.50. ISBN 0-8386-3846-5. Walter Benjamin began work on his doctoral thesis in Bern during the First World War and was awarded his doctorate in 1919. When it came to publishing the text, he was concerned that the difficultsituation of publishing houses after the war might make publishing unaffordable, and wrote to his friend Gershom Scholem that he did not mind about the size of type as long as the paper was of good quality. The topic of the dissertation was the concept of criticism in German Romanticism. Linking a text to its context is never easy, but when the context is the momentous changes in Germany in the winter of 1918-19, and when the text in question is written by a figure known in particular for creative forms of historical analysis, then it seems a missed opportunity not to make even an attempt. Walter Benjamin and Romanticism is the firstin a new series of 'Walter Benjamin Studies' which hopes to set 'new standards for scholarship on Benjamin for students and researchers in Philosophy, Cultural Studies and Literary Studies' (p. ii). The book collects twelve essays, at least half of which have been published before, discussing Benjamin's doctoral thesis and other well-known pieces that he wrote on Holderlin, Goethe, and the questions of language in the period 1914-23. A few of the essays in the collection make gestures towards context. Beatrice Hanssen's essay suggests that casualties of the war motivated Benjamin's interest in finitude in the Holderlin essay of 1914-15. Sigrid Weigel mentions the figure of the artist propagated by the George circle as a model with which Benjamin took issue in his essay on Die Wahlver? wandtschaften. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe discusses the common epoch informing Benjamin's reading of Holderlin in the 1910s and Heidegger's in the 1930s. The col? lection also wishes to convey the developing context of readings of Benjamin, since it reprints work, in particular by Winfried Menninghaus, that has become something of a standard reference. Nevertheless, the volume has not been conceived to illuminate context, except in the rather narrow sense of which books might have influenced Benjamin. The highlight of the collection is the translation of Menninghaus's chapter on Benjamin's doctoral thesis, which was originally published as part of his Unendliche Verdopplung (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1987). Menninghaus meticulously shows how Benjamin reads selected quotations from Novalis and Schlegel tendentiously and constructs a version of Romanticism that plays down the role of feeling and the imagination and privileges reflection as a form of immediate knowledge in a way that does not fairly represent his sources. At the same time, for Menninghaus, Benjamin's partial reading does capture a key element of the Romantic concept of reflection, raising the question of how Benjamin could articulate important aspects of German Romanticism even as he did violence to the texts. Menninghaus does not answer this question, but his essay very successfully positions itself both in? side and outside Benjamin's texts, combining sympathy with critical analysis in a way which could set the stage for a wider investigation of Benjamin's productive misreading. The essays by Anthony Phelan and Josh Cohen offerfurther clear ex? position of Benjamin's arguments about reflection, explaining how he replaces the infiniteregress of the individual subject thinking about thinking about thinking, ete., with a view of thinking which does not have the individual as its centre or starting point. Instead, a web of interconnections, in which the subject can participate but MLR, 100.3, 2005 753 which he or she does not initiate or control, replaces the subject-oriented linear regression . Menninghaus's essay sets out a problem: how can Benjamin be at once so wrong and so rightabout the Romantics? Phelan and Cohen clarifyaspects ofthe arguments. But the other essays in the...

Walter Benjamin's glimpses of the unconscious

Despite their overexposure, the writings of Walter Benjamin include appropriations and transfonnations of modernist architectural history and theory, the potential of which to illuminate the problematics of representation in the fields of architecture and photography remains insufficiently explored. In this essay, I focus on three moments in his writings, each of which touches on the issue of representation in a different way: first, Benjamin's reading of Carl Bötticher's theory of architectural tectonics as a theory of history in which the unconscious serves as a generative and productive source; second, Benjamin's transformation of Sigfried Giedion's presentation of iron structures into optical instruments for glimpsing a space interwoven with unconsciousness, a space the image of which had seemingly been captured by photography; and third, Benjamin's suggestion that the mimetic faculty continues to play within representation, history and technology to produce similarities between the human and the non-human. In each instance, Benjamin reworked the dynamic dualism of nineteenth-century tectonics — representation seeking reconciliation with alterity — into a dialectic. In so doing, he set the cause of revolution (of a modernity yet to come) against metaphysical and Utopian claims, progressive and regressive alike.

The Spectacle, the "Trauerspiel," and the Politics of Resolution: Benjamin Reading the Baroque Reading Weimar

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Spectacle, the "Trauerspiel," and the Politics of Resolution: Benjamin Reading the Baroque Reading WeimarLutz P. KoepnickLutz P. Koepnick Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 22, Number 2Winter, 1996 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/448791 Views: 13Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1994 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jane O. Newman The “German” Origin of the Birth of Theory, PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 130, no.33 (Oct 2020): 776–786.https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2015.130.3.776Carl Lavery, Deborah P Dixon, Lee Hassall The Future of Ruins: The Baroque Melancholy of Hashima, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 46, no.1111 (Jan 2014): 2569–2584.https://doi.org/10.1068/a46179Robin Vandevoordt Unspeakable resistance, Thesis Eleven 123, no.11 (Aug 2014): 62–79.https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513614544930Larson Powell Die gespenstische Politik der DEFA, (Apr 2013): 27–43.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-19076-1_2By Brian Britt The Schmittian Messiah in Agamben's The Time That Remains Brian Britt, Critical Inquiry 36, no.22 (Jul 2015): 262–287.https://doi.org/10.1086/648526Ron Kerr Discourse and leadership: using the paradigm of the permanent state of emergency, Critical Discourse Studies 5, no.33 (Aug 2008): 201–216.https://doi.org/10.1080/17405900802131702

Baudelaire: Liberte, Libertinage and Modernity

LE MODERN STYLE IN FRENCH LITERATURE ranges from Baudelaire's reading of Poe to the Modernism of Beckett, and the transition between these two phenomena might be located in Walter Benjamin's critique of literary Benjamin's work constitutes a double articulation that allows him to move between criticism (political ideology, the Russian Revolution, Marx, Brecht, Lukacs, revolutionary art) and a critique of Proust and Valery, who deliberately distanced their works and aesthetics from political concerns. The intersection between Benjamin's two fields of focus can be located in his framework of modernity. This conceptual frame arises at the crossroads of history, sociology, economics, urban architecture and politics. Their paths, passageways, and arcades map what he calls capitalism, filtered into the idiom of poetry. Benjamin's reading of modernity can best be seen in his analysis of the poetic oeuvre of Baudelaire.

The Politics of Youth: Walter Benjamin's Reading of The Idiot

The Politics of Youth: Walter Benjamin's Reading of The Idiot