In a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem in 1931 Benjamin felt it necessary to justify the precarious status of his "small writing factory situated in the middle of the west" (i.e. the solid bourgeois world of west Berlin).
He goes on to speak of himself as "someone who has been shipwrecked, who carries on while drifting on the wreckage, by climbing to the peak of the mast that is already crumbling. But he has a chance of sending out a signal for his rescue from up there." Benjamin's means of livlihood were never very secure, but, as he indicates in this letter, he viewed the danger of his situation first of all in terms of the multiple, often divergent cross-currents of his thought and work. This conference will examine a series of specific instances of the operation of Benjamin's "small writing factory."
SESSION I: 10:30 AM to 1:00 PM
Chair: Steven J. Mailloux, Critical Theory Emphasis, UC Irvine
Jane O. Newman, UC Irvine
"600 Citations. The Mosaiktechnik of Benjamin's Origin of the German Tragic Drama"
Respondent: Christopher Wild, UC Los Angeles
Sabine Gölz, University of Iowa
"Sternenphotographie. Reading Benjamin's Manuscripts"
Respondent: Kai Evers, UC Irvine
SESSION II: 2:00-5:00 PM
Chair: David Theo Goldberg, UC Humanities Research Institute
Alexander Gelley, UC Irvine
"Entering the Passageri"
Respondent: Wolf Kittler, UC Santa Barbara
Samuel Weber, Northwestern University
"Benjamin's '-abilities': the Story of a Suffix"
Respondent: Etienne Balibar, UC Irvine
Sponsored by: UCI Humanities Center, UC Humanities Research Institute, UCI
Critical Theory Emphasis, Department of German and Department of
Comparative Literature
For more information: (949) 824-9629 or 824-4638 |