Chapter 1 - Cosmopolitan Communities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
Most novels are in some sense knowable communities.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, 165Is there a poetics of the “interstitial” community?
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 231The political is the place where community as such is brought into play.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, xxxviiiWalter Benjamin tells us in his celebrated essay, “The Storyteller,” that, in the period after the First World War, “a process that had been going on for a long time” began to become apparent. “It is as if something inalienable to us … were taken from us,” he writes, “the ability to exchange experiences.” This ability to exchange experiences is the storyteller's art. It is, for Benjamin, an art that is based not only on the possibility of imagining a community of listeners but also on the relevance of experiences of the past. In the First World War, “A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds.” None of the past experiences of that generation prepared them to stand in that changed countryside; none helped them translate it into a story they could tell.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001