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Moving Beyond |
Medieval and Modern Languages, Oxford
This article explores Walter Benjamin's famous concept of the aura in relation to his writings on photography. Although Benjamin's "Artwork" essay charges photography with the decline of the aura of the traditional artwork, his essay on photography complicates this historical narrative, associating aura with early portrait photography but also with its successor, the commercial studio portrait. The childhood photograph of Franz Kafka, whose melancholy air serves Benjamin as an example of a paradoxical, post-auratic aura, recurs in his childhood memoirs, where the narrator projects himself into this picture. Benjamin's writings on photography thus develop an alternative concept of aura, one which transcends fixed historical or technological categories through the model of an imaginary encounter between viewer and image. This conception has far-reaching consequences not only for the theory of photography but also for its role within literature, as is suggested by Benjamin's empathetic engagement with the Kafka photograph and its incorporation into his own life story.
Barthes, Roland 2000 [1980] Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard (London: Vintage).
Benjamin, Walter 1972 Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert, in Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 4: 235-304 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).
1974a "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit," in Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 1: 471-508 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).
1974b "Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire," in Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 1: 511-604 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).
1974c "Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire," in Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 1: 605-53 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).
1977a "Franz Kafka: Zur zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages," in Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 2: 409-38 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).
1977b "Kleine Geschichte der Photographie," in Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 2: 368-85 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).
1985 "Haschisch Anfang März 1930," in Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 6: 587-91 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).
1989 Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert: Fassung letzter Hand, in Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7: 385-433 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).
1999a "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death," in Selected Writings, translated by Rodney Livingstone, edited by Michael W. Jennings, 2: 794-818 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap).
1999b "Hashish, Beginning of March 1930," in Selected Writings, edited by Michael W. Jennings, 2: 327-30 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap).
1999c "Little History of Photography," in Selected Writings, edited by Michael W. Jennings, 2: 507-30 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap).
2000 Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert: Gießener Fassung, edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).
2002 Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1934 version), in Selected Writings, edited by Michael W. Jennings, 3: 387-413 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap).
2003a "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Selected Writings, edited by Michael W. Jennings, 4: 314-55 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap).
2003b "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," in Selected Writings, edited by Michael W. Jennings, 4: 3-92 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap).
2003c "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," in Selected Writings, edited by Michael W. Jennings, 4: 251-83 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap).
2006 Berlin Childhood around 1900, translated by Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Belknap).
Brecht, Bertolt 1993 Journals, translated by Hugh Robinson, edited by John Willett (London: Methuen).
Cadava, Eduardo 1997 Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Dubois, Philippe 1983 L'acte photographique (Paris: Nathan).
Duttlinger, Carolin 2004 "Traumatic Photographs: Remembrance and the Technical Media in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz," in W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion, edited by J. J. Long and Anne White-head, 155-71 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
2007 Kafka and Photography (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Ferris, David S. 1996 "Introduction: Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History," in Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, edited by David S. Ferris, 1-26 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
Fürnkäs, Josef 2000 "Aura," in Benjamins Begriffe, edited by Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla, 1: 95-146 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).
Hamilton, Peter, and Roger Hargreaves 2001 The Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century Photography (Aldershot, U.K.: Lund Humphries).
Hansen, Miriam 1987 "Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience: `The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,'" New German Critique 40: 179-224.
Krauss, Rolf H. 1998 Walter Benjamin und der neue Blick auf die Photographie (Ostfildern, Germany: Cantz).
Opitz, Michael, and Erdmut Wizisla, eds. 2000 Benjamins Begriffe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).
Richter, Gerhard 2004 "Acts of Self-Portraiture: Benjamin's Confessional and Literary Writings," in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by David S. Ferris, 221-37 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Rosenblum, Naomi 1997 A World History of Photography, 3rd ed. (New York: Abeville).
Rugg, Linda Haverty 1997 Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Schöttker, Detlev 2004 "Benjamins Bilderwelten: Objekte, Theorien, Wirkungen," in Schrift—Bilder—Denken: Walter Benjamin und die Künste, edited by Detlev Schöttker, 10-29 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).
Sebald, W. G. 2001 Austerlitz, translated by Anthea Bell (London: Hamish Hamilton).
Silverman, Kaja 1996 The Threshold of the Visible World (New York and London: Routledge).
Stoessel, Marleen 1983 Aura: Das vergessene Menschliche; Zu Sprache und Erfahrung bei Walter Benjamin (Munich: Hanser).
Tiedemann, Rolf 1971 "Aura," in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, edited by Joachim Ritter, 1: 652-53 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft).
2000 "Nachwort," in Benjamin 2000: 113-26.
Witte, Bernd 1991 Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, translated by James Rolleston (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press).
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