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Uncreative Influence: Louis Aragon’S Paysan De Paris And Walter Benjamin’S Passagen-Werk, Václav Paris

Publications and Research

This paper looks at the role Louis Aragon’s 1926 novel Paris Peasant played in the composition of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. How we might theorize the literary appeal of the Arcades Project, as evidenced in contemporary poetry and visual art; and, more broadly, what is the relation between the aesthetics and the philosophy or politics in Benjamin’s text? The model I propose is one of a Bloomian “anxiety of influence.” By looking at Benjamin’s earlier writings and his correspondence with Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem, we see not only that Benjamin’s work shared much with Aragon’s brand of Surrealism, but …