Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Walter Benjamin's Literary Aura: A Stylistic And Thematic Analysis Of One-Way Street, Stephanie Chapman

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

“Brevity” epitomizes Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street, an avant-garde text composed entirely of aphorisms. Benjamin's ideal of literary montage involves the utilization of ideas that he refers to as Abfall, or detritus, and rearranging them—preserved in the momentary spontaneity in which they were conceived—in order to create an entirely new meaning. Noteworthy about Benjamin's style is the manner in which the assembly of momentary thoughts and impressions creates, in a literary sense, the artistic aura of authenticity introduced in his seminal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” By preserving the form, content, and style …

Feelings Sustaining Text: Aphorisms And Inspiration, Mikhail Pozdniakov

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

There are genres of reflection, one of which is constituted by the aphorism. These reflections are an art of ponderance, of pensiveness. Philosophy is not necessarily the best example, nor is it identical with the genre of reflection as such; it has had a hard time breaking with its derivative moments, and its history is of a catalogue of dogmas as well as progressive critiques. In logic, one of philosophy’s products, the continuous or infinite form of knowledge is condensed into the axiom or principle or formula, which carries the appearance of a statement of fact. Contrary to the latter, …

Infanticide And The Anxious Silence Of “Language As Such”, Kevin Godbout

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

No abstract provided.

Pasolini's Laugh: Joyful Ignorance In The Decameron, Andrea Privitera

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

In this paper, I discuss Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron and its 1971 film adaptation by Pier Paolo Pasolini. To be more precise, I focus on the fifth novella of the sixth day, the one about Giotto and Forese, and its audiovisual re-elaboration, which can be seen as a very brief and at the same time very vivid example of Pasolini’s ideas on society, language and communication.

Georges Bataille, Philosopher Of Laughter, Troy M. Bordun

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

Why is it that when we laugh – not at jokes or to patronize – but when we laugh ecstatically and drift away from the self that seemed to constitute the majority of waking life, we feel free, at ease? And why is it, asked Georges Bataille, that after this ecstatic moment we come back to the mundane everyday with the feeling of a new and ineffable knowledge about human existence?

In this paper I present Bataille on laughter and its merits as a philosophical project. Laughter is an experience to be theorized and a praxis aiding in our pursuit …