‘All at Sea’: Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and the Unknown German

CounterText ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-233
Author(s):  
John Schad
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
Jewish Refugees

On July 10, 1940, amidst fear of Nazi invasion, a prison ship, of sorts, left Liverpool, England, crammed full of over two thousand male ‘Enemy Aliens’ – Germans, Austrians, and some Italians. They were herded together, below deck, with all hatches sealed. Some were prisoners of war, some were passionate Nazis, but most were Jewish refugees. Among them was Walter Benjamin's estranged son, a young man of 22 years, Stefan Rafael Schoenflies Benjamin. Soon after boarding, however, the authorities mistakenly recorded his surname as Benjamini. ‘All at Sea’, John Schad's critical-creative piece, recounts events around ‘the unknown German’ on the vessel, playing richly on, and with, recognition effects around what is (un)familiarly known about Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and various kinds of connection between them and other figures from the period.

scholarly journals The Burden of the Past, the Dialectics of the Present: Notes on Virginia Woolf's and Walter Benjamin's Philosophies of History

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanja Bahun
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Face

Writing in a Paris rife with war-anxieties, refugees and political plots, a stateless individual by the name of Walter Benjamin recorded on 11 January 1940: “Every line that we succeed in publishing today - given the uncertainty of the future to which we consign it - is a victory wrested from the power of darkness.” The fusion of desperation and mystical activism in the face of historical horror, expressed in Benjamin's last letter to Gershom Scholem, was echoed across the Channel. Only ten days later, Virginia Woolf - assailed by a mixture of historical, financial, creative and publishing worries - responded to a commission to write about peace by stating that the “views on peace […] spring from views on war.”

The Question of Justice in the Novel of Consciousness

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 148-173
Author(s):  
Michael Vander Weele
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Marilynne Robinson ◽  
The Third ◽  
As If

Abstract Marilynne Robinson’s achievement in the third novel of the Iowa trilogy can be seen more clearly if measured against Erich Auerbach’s ambivalence about the novel of consciousness. Using Auerbach’s final chapter of Mimesis, on Virginia Woolf, as the horizon for Robinson’s work clarifies two points: Robinson’s work should be viewed within a novel-of-consciousness tradition that is as much European as American; and Robinson’s religious interests turn that tradition toward a more anthropological concern with the complexity of consciousness framed by the concern for justice. While Nicholas Damas’s recent essay in The Atlantic, “The New Fiction of Solitude” (April 2016), claimed that much new fiction “imagines teaching us how to be separate” and Walter Benjamin already wrote at mid-century that “the ability to exchange experiences” disappeared sometime after World War I, in Lila it is as if Marilynne Robinson set out to show both the difficulty and the possibilities of such exchange.

scholarly journals Review of Angeliki Spiropoulou's Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin

HISTOREIN ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 98
Author(s):  
Jana Funke
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Walter Benjamin

Review of Angeliki Spiropoulou's <em>Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin</em>

scholarly journals Linguistic, cultural and history-related studies on Jews in Finland: a look into the scholarship in the twenty-first century

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Ekholm ◽  
Simo Muir ◽  
Oula Silvennoinen
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
First Century ◽  
Jewish Refugees ◽  
Academic Publications ◽  
General Studies ◽  
Second World

There has been a significant growth in volume and disciplines working on Jewish history and culture in Finland for the past fifteen years, yet no systematic overview of scholarly efforts have been available. This article aims to fill this gap. Our focus is on the disciplines of linguistics, cultural studies and history. Our overview covers monographs and articles that have appeared in academic publications since 2000, with a focus on Finland. Consequently we have left out Finnish research on Jews in other parts of the globe from our review. About half of the works introduced in this article have been published in Finnish and will now be briefly introduced to a wider Nordic scholarly community. The article consists of four parts. First we discuss Jewish studies and social history pursued in Finland. We then discuss studies focusing on antisemitism in Finland. The third part introduces the relevant literature on Finland’s role in the Second World War and its responsibility towards the conflict’s Jewish refugees and prisoners of war, after which studies on Finnish history culture and memory politics are presented. The final part presents biographies and general studies about the Jewish community in Finland. 

scholarly journals Virginia Woolf: narrativa poética n'"A estreita ponte da arte”

Signo ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (66) ◽  
pp. 315
Author(s):  
Brena Suelen Siqueira ◽  
Fani Miranda Tabak
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Georg Lukacs ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Georg Lukács

Este artigo versará sobre o ponto de vista de Virginia Woolf acerca da evolução do romance, ou melhor, da arte da ficção, como a própria denomina, em alguns ensaios presentes no livro Granite and rainbow (1975), obra com vinte e cinco artigos editados postumamente por Leonard Woolf. Tais ensaios retratam um pouco do pensamento woolfiano que será confrontado com a construção do romance To the lighthouse, publicado em 1927. Dialoga-se, ainda, com as categorias teóricas utilizadas por Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács e Walter Benjamin que podem complementar a compreensão, sobretudo, do narrador e do romance.

scholarly journals New forms for our new sensations: a convergência de novos sons e imagens na modernidade e o seu reflexo na literatura de Virginia Woolf

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (8) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
Isadora Meneses Rodrigues
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Walter Benjamin

“New forms for our new sensations”, foi o que declarou a escritora inglesa Virginia Woolf em um de seus primeiros ensaios, Hours in a Library, escrito para jornal Times Literary Supplement, em 1916. Nesse texto, a autora discorre sobre a necessidade de a literatura criar novas formas e técnicas para expressar as experiências audiovisuais singulares que contaminaram as cidades na primeira metade do século XX. Nesse sentido, este trabalho tem como objetivo refletir sobre como essas alterações na matéria do pensamento e da experiência acabaram reverberando na ficção de fluxo de consciência, mais especificamente na literatura woolfiana. Para evidenciar essa relação, nos apoiamos em teóricos que tratam da transformação na estrutura da experiência do homem como sendo um reflexo das mudanças no cotidiano provocadas pela modernidade, como Walter Benjamin, George Simmel e Marshall Berman.

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