The Nazi Party came into power in Germany in 1933. The critic and writer Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) foresaw the consequences this new regime would have among the jewish population and that very same year he fled to Paris. During his exile he wrote some of the most relevant essays that reflected his thought. “Experience and poverty” (1933) (REF) is among those. Here, Benjamin introduces the concept of “poverty of experience”, an idea he would go through again in “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” (1936) (REF). In both essays he presents a humanity whose poverty must prepare it for a new “start from zero” from an optimistic perspective. From now on, this essay will name this idea as “Poverty of experience I” (PEI). Nevertheless
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It was handed down in short form to sons and grandsons, with the authority of age, in proverbs with an often long-winded eloquence, as tales sometimes as stories from foreign lands, at the fireside” says Benjamin in “Poverty and experience”. This illustrates that, according to Benjamin, experience has a narrative structure . What is more, this structure is what allows people to narrate their own history, or, at least, to have something to tell. In other words, this narrative structure facilitates not only the integration of their experience into the story of their life, but also into their community. As Salzani points out, narration must be understood as “an art of repeating stories” and it has disappeared in modern time now that people lack the state of relaxation which is essential in order to assimilate, retain and understand those tales as part of one´s own experience. According to Benjamin, after the First World War this storytelling ability has been not only broken but depreciated, forcing the new civilization to start from zero rather than resuming it from the point where their predecessors left …show more content…
Ortega y Gasset also uses this idea in his 1927 book The dehumanization of art” (REF). There he declares that the new civilization “has declared that the intrusion of the human in art is taboo” (REF) and that the artists and viewers of avant-gardé´s works of art are forced into an “abstruse universe” where one cannot be recognized. Only when rid and devoid of “a greater past” illusions, can the new civilization rejoice (delight?)themselves without relying on anything
It was handed down in short form to sons and grandsons, with the authority of age, in proverbs with an often long-winded eloquence, as tales sometimes as stories from foreign lands, at the fireside” says Benjamin in “Poverty and experience”. This illustrates that, according to Benjamin, experience has a narrative structure . What is more, this structure is what allows people to narrate their own history, or, at least, to have something to tell. In other words, this narrative structure facilitates not only the integration of their experience into the story of their life, but also into their community. As Salzani points out, narration must be understood as “an art of repeating stories” and it has disappeared in modern time now that people lack the state of relaxation which is essential in order to assimilate, retain and understand those tales as part of one´s own experience. According to Benjamin, after the First World War this storytelling ability has been not only broken but depreciated, forcing the new civilization to start from zero rather than resuming it from the point where their predecessors left …show more content…
Ortega y Gasset also uses this idea in his 1927 book The dehumanization of art” (REF). There he declares that the new civilization “has declared that the intrusion of the human in art is taboo” (REF) and that the artists and viewers of avant-gardé´s works of art are forced into an “abstruse universe” where one cannot be recognized. Only when rid and devoid of “a greater past” illusions, can the new civilization rejoice (delight?)themselves without relying on anything