Event overview
GLITS (Goldsmiths Literature Seminar)
This week GLITS presents a special event focusing on the recent publication of Walter Benjamin’s fiction works, The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness (Verso, 2016) and the topic of Benjamin's philosophical fiction more broadly. Co-editor and co-translator of this volume, Dr. Sebastian Truskolaski, will be in discussion with Christopher Law (Goldsmiths). This is set to be a very exciting event, providing rare insight into Benjamin’s creative practice.
The Storyteller brings together new, English translations of Walter Benjamin’s short stories, alongside selections of his reviews, travel writing, dream accounts, and texts on childhood and pedagogy.
The appearance of the collection draws welcome attention not only to the existence of such forms in Benjamin’s corpus, but to the often overlooked place of fiction within Benjamin’s work itself. Insofar as they presage his philosophical, theoretical and critical outputs, Benjamin’s stories no doubt put his ideas in play, evidently doing a kind of philosophical work usually associated with more conceptually-motivated, if not systematic, forms of writing.
At the same time, Benjamin’s stories practise and gesture toward a mode of writing that is irreducible to the thetic form of philosophy, which holds sway even for a writer whose presentational capacities were as rich and various as Benjamin’s. Reflecting on and departing from such problems, this event will feature short presentations, responses and opportunities for thoroughgoing discussion on the constellations of philosophy and fiction in Benjamin, his forebearers, and his interlocutors throughout the twentieth century and beyond.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 20 Oct 2016 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
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