Response 5: Benjamin and Stein

DUE: October 10, 2013

Focus your fifth response on Walter Benjamin's essay or either of the Gertrude Stein excerpts we read for class. You can choose to base your response on either of the readings for 10/3 and 10/8, or do a comparative analysis that focuses on both. Here are a few prompts if you're having trouble getting started:

  • In class on 10/3, we listed some organizing contrasts found in Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller." Some of those contrasts were: novel vs. story, experience passed orally/directly v. written experience (CR 108), farmer v. traveling sailor (CR 105), oral vs. print tradition (CR 106), community engagement v. isolation of novelist and reader (CR 106, 111), perplexity v. counsel/wisdom (CR 106), meaning of life vs. the moral of the story (CR 110), miraculous v. plausible (CR 106), story v. news/explanation, craftsman v. factory worker, the novel ends and burns away, while the story does not – it is immortal and timeless (CR 111, 114). Choose an organizing contrast (it doesn't have to be on the list), and then analyze its development or its implications in Benjamin's essay. Choose one or two key passages that represent the contrast and try to build your analysis around those.
  • About the storyteller, Benjamin writes: “one can go on and ask oneself whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftsman’s relationship, whether it is not his very task to fashion the raw material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful, and unique way" (CR 114). Given what you understand of Stein, how does this describe (or not) her project as she lays it out in the reading? While she seems to bear little in common with Benjamin’s notion of “story” and her massive book The Making of Americans certainly does not tell a story, is she "fashioning the raw material of experience ... in a solid, useful, and unique way"?
  • To read or not to read? In class on 10/8, we looked at some different approaches to reading Stein, and The Making of Americans in particular. In your response, compare the following approaches to Stein: reading a passage closely for its meaning, OR the "visual means of reading" approach that Ulla Dydo/Kenneth Goldsmith discuss in this handout [.pdf]. The first approach reads closely for meaning in the language, while the second approach skims the text, treats words as visual markers, and looks for other attributes described in the handout. Try to read/analyze a passage using both methods and discuss which method was easier and/or more appropriate and why.
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