Cirrus@Austlit

'Guanglin explores Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator, wherein the German critic famously shifts the problem of translation against the Western mimetic tradition. Instead of a concern with the original being reproduced, Benjamin posits an event between languages. Moreover, Benjamin's Passagenwerk or Arcades Project demonstrates the mode of assembling and disassembling networked fragments. Elsewhere in Benjamin, the "cities" acquire the significance of palimpsest to be read. The Arcades Project, which would be posthumously edited and was never given a completed form, takes nineteenth-century Paris as a testing ground and site of emergence of modern techno-history. Among other things, Guanglin examines Shanghai Dancing, which serves this role in Brian Castro's writing.' (Publication summary)