Author Archives: sfbull5

I read this text earlier in the semester for another class, so it was interesting for me to go back and read it a second time having read a lot of literary criticism in between.  I found Benjamin’s text to be much more philosophical than most of the other pieces we’ve read this semester. He talks a lot about the “essence” of an original piece of art (including a piece of literature) and how that unique aura is not  reproducible, especially in the age of mechanical reproduction. Without the original, he seems to be arguing that some amount of tradition gets lost and the text’s actual essence is lost; the translation becomes nothing more than a superficial copy of the words on the page without a reproduction of the text’s core meaning. We’ve talked a lot about beginnings and endings in this class and how the beginning/ending of any given text is irrelevant (according to certain theories), and it seems like Benjamin’s arguments fall in a similar area. Once a text is “emancipated…from its parasitical dependence on ritual” (however negative that phrase sounds), it seems to me that Benjamin believes the translation loses some necessary element. Making art available for the masses (the clear purpose of mechanical reproduction), to him, destroys some of the originality that art could once potentially maintain but is now unobtainable.

I thought Anzaldua’s article on the Frontier and the new “Mestiza” was interesting and presented some new ideas, but I didn’t exactly see the relevance to this course or to the other texts we’ve read. It seemed appropriate for a Sociology class or something, but I didn’t find a lot about English or literary interpretation. I guess her ideas about changing “the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave” — in other words, the “new mestiza” that she proposes — are slightly related to interpretation of texts, and the notions of immigration do in some sense relate to the “otherness” and “orientalism” that we’ve been reading about recently, but do you guys see any other ways in which this article is relevant to this course/to other texts?

This isn’t the weekly post, but I was just curious if anyone had opinions:

Both Gallagher and B&R bring up Adam Smith and compare his theories, in one way or another, to literature and literary theory. Gallagher references Smith to make the (somewhat satirical) claim that “only in the context of the economy does homo appetitus  turn into homo economicus” and that in a potato economy, the market is irrelevant to the self-sufficient, self-reliant homo apetitus  species (131). Bennett and Royle quote Smith directly, saying “Before the invention of the art of printing [which obviously gave way to the ‘literature’ we have today], a scholar and a beggar seem to have been terms very nearly synonymous” (119). The economy is a major factor in people’s lives and undoubtedly plays a role in people’s writings. So, taking into consideration the different viewpoints of the role of the author, what would you say is the appropriate relationship between the economy and literature today?