• Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.293-313
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• 2013

The City is not simple space run daily life but shows the space of cultural memory and trace. This study examined Walter Benjamin Passge Project, and how to read and record the city of Benjamin discussed. In addition, research and how to apply to the archives of the city is made based on case studies and analysis of the Urban Archive, and to suggest the direction of the archive that holds the future of the city.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.2
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• pp.217-235
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• 2011

On recognizing the significance of Walter Benjamin's "The Task of a Translator" in recent discourses of postcolonial cultural translation, this essay examines the creative postcolonialist appropriations of Benjamin's theory of translation and their political implications. In an effort to dismantle the imperialist political hierarchy between the West and the non-West, modernity and its "primitive" others, which has been the operative premise of the traditional translation studies and anthropology, newly emergent discourses of cultural translation actively adopts Benjamin's notion of translation that does not prioritize the original text's claim on authenticity. Benjamin theorizes each text-translation as well as the original-as an incomplete representation of the pure language. Eschewing formalistic views propounded by deconstructionist critics like Paul de Man, who tend to regard Benjamin's notion of the untranslatable purely in terms of the failure inherent in the language system per se, such postcolonialist critics as Tejaswini Niranjana, Rey Chow, and Homi Bhabha, each in his/her unique way, recuperate the significatory potential of historicity embedded in Benjamin's text. Their further appropriation of the concept of the "untranslatable" depends on a radically political turn that, instead of focusing on the failure of translation, salvages historical as well as cultural potentiality that lies between disparate cultural entities, signifying differences, or disjunctures, that do not easily render themselves to existing systems of representation. It may therefore be concluded that postcolonial discourses on cultural translation of Niranhana, Chow, and Bhabha, inspired by Benjamin, each translate the latter's theory into highly politicized understandings of translation, and this leads to an extensive rethinking of the act of translation itself to include all forms of cultural exchange and communicative activities between cultures. The disjunctures between these discourses and Benjamin's text, in that sense, enable them to form a sort of theoretical constellation, which aspires to an impossible yet necessary utopian ideal of critical thinking.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.3
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• pp.445-459
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• 2010

William Carlos Williams discovers important sources of inspiration in the revolutionary avant-garde movements, in particular, Dada and Surrealism and attempted to embody the innovations in them in his poetic theory and practice. Williams's passion to create an indigenous American poetic work is compatible with his Dadaist experimentation with objets trouvés. Williams pays deep attention to objets trouvés, physical objects and marginalized people he comes across and transcribes his observations with poetic words freed from their instrumental contexts. In his characteristic poems written in the 1920s and 1930s, Williams records the social ruination and his task to give voice to the conflictual and fragmentary character of modernity is pursued through the Surrealist formulation of montage. In the Surrealist formulation of montage, the dialectical image is a central trope for reading the myth of modernity; it is positioned as both subject and object in the historiographic narratives of Walter Benjamin and Williams. As Benjamin tries to obliterate all traces of the author in the Arcades Project, Williams's montage poems like Spring and All only disperse argument into materialistic, dialectical images. The dialectical image in Williams's poetics becomes an organon of historical awakening so that truth can emerge from an unmediated juxtaposition of "things."

• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
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• v.143
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• pp.245-266
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• 2017

Walter Benjamin's unique concept of the aura is mainly presented in his three essays, Little History of Photography(1931), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction(1935-1939), and On Some Motifs in Baudelaire(1939), whereas the studies on this concept are principally conducted on the basis of the first two essays. But considering Benjamin elaborated the concept through Baudelaire studies, the aura needs to be reexamined on the axis of "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire". He approached Baudelaire studies in one of the essential items for The Arcades Project at first. These studies acquired a new prospect soon after he mapped out these studies for an independent book in 1938. His Baudelaire studies come to fruition in On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, written one year after The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire(1938). For Benjamin, Baudelaire is not only a poet who sharply testified to the age of the decay of aura, but also the one who elaborated new poetic motifs such as the metropolis, the crowd: the poet searched for his poems in the crowd of the metropolis, by accepting as poetic nourishment all sorts of experiences of the impact of daily occurrunces in Paris. In On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, the aura is defined as the response of a gaze, that is, the capability to gaze on something. It is principally a poetic capacity to give the capability of opening the eyes to an animal, or even to an inanimate object. If a gaze is responded by the other for which the gaze is placed upon, we experience the other's own aura. The media of the mechanical reproduction (such as the photography, the film) give rise to the decay of aura, because the expectation of returning one's gaze becomes frustrated from the outset.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.10 no.7
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• pp.142-148
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• 2010

In the society where contradiction of modernism in 20th century was vividly exposed and paradigm was being changed from text culture into visual culture according to the development of technology, Benjamin tried to practically suggest solutions for socio-historical problems he was facing. In contrast with Adorno who criticized cultural industry, Benjamin found out the possibility to overturn existing value order and innovate reality in mass art media having emerged according to the development of new technology. And such Utopian possibility appears in his thought on the early Disney animation even if it is fragmentary. This thesis reviews how Utopian possibility was realized in the early Disney animation, which had been thought by Benjamin.

• Journal of architectural history
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.7-16
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• 2015

It is not easy to clarify the historical perspective of architect through his architecture. Exceptional cases, it will be the time to design a history museum. As an institution, a Museum already became an apparatus to represent the history to it itself. Libeskind's Jewish museum Berlin has been presented as the controversial case most of all. In particular, in that it instead of dealing with history positive, that contains a tragic history, this building is a building that history a unique interpretation of the architect has been a problem. Therefore, it is difficult to find a suitable example to Libeskind's Jewish museum in Berlin to try and look at the problem of the history of contemporary history and interpretation of the architect. In this paper, I am trying to interpret Libeskind's Jewish Museum Berlin through the aesthetics and history philosophy of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. They are Jewish and the central figures of the Frankfurt School, known as 'critical theorists'. Their critical theory was formed based on the experience of the Jewish genocide and war.

• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.163-182
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• 2002

In Origin of the German Mourning Play(1928), the critic Waltre Benjamin strongly criticized the German Romantic concept of the symbol, according to which the universal and ideal can be represented wholly in the particular and empirical by virtue of an ontological connection between them. Yet this criticism did not prevent Benjamin, in his epistemological preface to the book, from availing himself of the same monadological model (derived from Leibniz and Goethe) on which the Romantics had relied. Although he specifically rejected their insistence on the fusion of the phenomenal and the ideal in the symbol, his own theory of Ideas and their presentation in criticism nonetheless requires just such a fusion. This is not immediately apparent for two reasons: first, Benjamin proposes, in contrast to Platonic and Romantic theory, that Ideas themselves are subject to historical change, and therefore not capable of manifesting themselves fully in any given historical phenomenon; and second, he proposes that Ideas rather than phenomena are monads, individually representing the whole of the world in which they participate. The task of the critic, which Benjamin calls Darstellung("presentation"), consists in revealing Ideas by reducing historical phenomena to their constituent elements and reassembling those elements in what amounts to a mosaic of quotations. But this task is possible only if the critic has a preconception of the Idea he is trying to reveal-a possibility that Benjamin′s theory of knowledge does not allow for at all- or if he can discern the Ideas in the individual phenomenal fragments from which he creates his mosaic, in which case phenomena and Ideas must be related monadologically after all. Benjamin seems to admit the latter possibility in a cryptic sentence in the manuscript draft of his preface to the Origin, but he does not do so in the final printed version. Thus he effectively deprived the critic of an epistemological basis for the presentation of Ideas.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.961-973
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• 2009

Walter Benjamin expresses his concern that the new technologies of mechanical reproduction robs the artwork of its own uniqueness, its "aura." Benjamin uses the word "aura" to refer to the sense of awe or reverence one presumably experiences in the presence of works of art. This aura does not merely inhere in the works of art themselves, because Benjamin extends his notion of aura to the level of how he both understands and positions the modern subject in the world of uncertainty and transitoriness. The theoretical framework of Benjaminian aura becomes a crucial and efficient strategic apparatus to read The Education of Henry Adams. As for Benjamin the modern implies a sense of alienation, a historical discontinuity, and a decisive break with tradition, Adams observes that modern civilization has wiped out "tradition," a mythic home in which man can experience order and unity. Adams claims that the growth of science, reason, and multiplicity at the expense of religion, feeling, and unity has been accompanied by a parallel growth in individualism at the expense of community and tradition. To Adams the collapse of traditional values such as maternity, fecundity, and security in America is a waking nightmare of the moral dilemmas of a capitalist society, in which the cruel force of the modern Dynamo is becoming a prime governing principle.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.33
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• pp.309-330
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• 2013

This paper explores the concept of pure language introduced in Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator" and looks at various perspectives on this concept represented in theories of Paul De Man and Gilles Deleuze and a short story of Jorge Luis Borges. According to "The Task of the Translator," pure language is defined as a vessel of which fragments are the original and the translation. Just as fragments are part of a vessel, so the original and the translation are fragments of a greater language, which is pure language. On the other hand, De Man, from a deconstructive criticism, says that pure language does not exist except as a permanent disjunction, which inhabits all languages as such, and that any work is totally fragmented in relation to this pure language and every translation is totally fragmented in relation to the original. While De Man consider pure language incorporeal, Deleuzian interpretation regards it as a virtual object or differenciator in relation to which the two series of the original and the translation coexist and resonate. Finally in Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" Menard attempt to translate Cervantes's Don Quixote identically in every detail. By showing a case in which the original and the translation are the same, Borges raises a question what would take place in relation to pure language if the original and the translation were identical. In Deleuze, identity and resemblance are the result of a differenciator, but in Borges, identity is a differenciator which produces differences. If we apply this logic to the last paragraph of "The Task of the Translator," we can say the interlinear version of Scriptures, as the prototype or ideal of all translation, in the form of which the original and the translation must be one, is a differenciator, an endless difference-making machine.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.163-189
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• 2017

The mourning and grief practice richly registered in Shakespeare's Hamlet is one of the abiding themes that critics have been fascinated with. This paper attempts to take a fresh look at the issue by building its arguments on Benjamin's insight that the modern art (mechanically) reproducing the exhibition value brings about the destruction of the ritual value and favors the conditions of melancholy. Instead of taking for granted that Hamlet's performance of grief is fundamentally different from those of other characters such as Gertrude, Ophelia, and Laertes, this paper argues that Hamlet's performance comes to be recognized masculine and different from others, only because he presents himself to be so through his theatrical performance as well as his princely power that the subjects (others in the story) ought to ascribe to. To prove this point, this paper closely analyzes Hamlet's rhetorics and the ways he constructs his mourning self, which is emblematic of the shift in art history that Benjamin has characterized with the terms of "ritual value" and "exhibition value." In conclusion, this paper suggests that Shakespeare's Hamlet marks the change of the historical horizon, a permanent removal from the past in which the ritual value had been once protected, pushing us to a new age to live with melancholy and the disconnection from things and their muted language.