walter benjamin on the mimetic faculty pdf

If the small is intrinsically linked to the gigantic, Walser masterfully explores its gentle power to expose the monstrosity of the large-scale machinery. Smallness, it seems, is conveyed here as an anachronistic virtue, as a tool to acknowledge the self, and perhaps as a shield against the threats of a capitalist society. As form, subject matter, and materiality of the text are intertwined in Walser’s writings, the radical minimalism of this statement might as well function as a crossroads between the novel’s narrative world, the protagonist’s lebensphilosophie and Walser’s poetics. Interestingly, these acts are in themselves more litotes than hyperbole, more modestia than vanitas: “Was anderen das meiste ist, ist mir das mindeste” (“What is the most for others is the least to me”), Tanner explains at one point his beautifully strange ethos. Short episodes of employment and conformity are interrupted by even shorter acts of rebellion. Famously, Simon Tanner, the protagonist of Walser’s first novel The Tanners (1907), composed in 18 loosely arranged episodes, struggles with the demands of modern life.

more If acceleration, augmentation, multiplication, and exaggeration are main characteristics of modernity, Robert Walser’s writings have the tendency to navigate in the opposite direction. If acceleration, augmentation, multiplication, and exaggeration are main characteristics of moder.

Walter benjamin on the mimetic faculty pdf