Writing on the wall: Benjamin, Kafka, Borges, and the chinese imaginary

• Autores: Carlos Rojas
• Localización: 452ºF: Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada, ISSN-e 2013-3294, Nº. 13, 2015, págs. 71-81
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Using Kafka’s short story “The Great Wall of China” as a starting point, this essay examines the ways in which a dialectics of inclusion and exclusion, construction and destruction, have been deployed in discussions of identity and difference. In particular, I argue that even as Walter Benjamin uses Kafka as a starting point to reflect on how the West imagines China as a space of radical alterity, Kafka’s own Great Wall story is interested instead in how China conceives its relationship to its own strategic Other, which in turn offers a model for how we might understand the West itself.