Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Allen, Ira
• Chari, Anita

Titel

Dialectical and Comic Reflections: On Translating Benjamin’s Radio Work

Ist Teil von

• Theory & event, 2015-07, Vol.18 (3), p.N_A

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• [...]we contend, these radio pieces require translation not only of words but also of medium-and they require this because the originals were Benjamin's intentional interventions into radio as a relatively new and massifying form of experience in Weimar Germany,7 were mediations of that medium itself. [...]Chari and her musical collaborator, Carol Genetti, give voice to a kind of dyadic process that, by turns opposing and melting together, does not reify "animality" or "humanity," "science" or "savagery," but rather explores-just as Benjamin does in the framing remarks with which he surrounds the stories he tells children in this program-the co-constitution of these categories, their dialectical entwining. The difficulty, as Burke has it, is that "in breaking down the clear lines of demarcation by which his character has been formed, the dispossessed sectarian is in danger of losing his character" (101). Since all critics are in some sense dispossessed sectarians, the trouble Burke hopes to forestall is a tendency towards endlessly reflexive debunking that would literally rob us of who we are. [...]unfinally, then, a comic frame is provisional: