Benjamin and Jackson Literary Reproductions Walter Benjamin 1892

Benjamin and Jackson Literary Reproductions

Walter Benjamin • 1892: Born in Berlin • Studied philosophy in Germany • Worked as a freelance writer and translator • 1933 fled Germany for France • Corresponded with major Marxist philosophers and artists of the time • 1940 committed suicide attempting to flee France

Art and Reproduction • Original artworks have an “aura” associated with their unique presence in space and time, their authenticity • Mechanical reproduction (lithography, photography, sound recording, printing, mass dissemination) destroys the aura • The loss of aura is not necessarily a negative affect for Benjamin: it transfers the function of art from ritual to politics

Shelley Jackson • 1963: Born • B. A. in Art from Stanford University; MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University • 1995 published Patchwork Girl in Story. Space with Eastgate Systems • 1997 published My Body, a Wunderkammer &, on the web • Skin, an ongoing project, asks volunteers to tattoo one word of the story on their bodies

Literary Hypertext • Literary application of information systems based on links and nodes • Allows for reader-directed, choicedbased, and aleatory reading—no fixed direction or course through the text • Organized around lexias (chunks of text) and links to other lexias. • Meaning and coherence are cumulative, not linear