The Relevance of the Irrelevant: Wisdom and/of Contingency

Claviez, Thomas (2020). The Relevance of the Irrelevant: Wisdom and/of Contingency (In Press). In: Dorson, James; Sedlmeier, Florian; Snyder-Körber, MaryAnn; Wege, Birte (eds.) Anecdotal modernity : making and unmaking history. Anglia Book Series: Vol. 68 (pp. 169-180). Berlin: De Gruyter

Full text not available from this repository.

The anecdote has, for quite some time, enjoyed a rather singular position within literary studies. When perusing the growing corpus of academic essays and books on the subject of the anecdote, one cannot fail to notice that hardly a single contribution exists that does not refer, one way or another, ex- or implicitly, to the thoroughly contingent nature of this phenomenon. In what follows, I will put this quality at the center of my investigation in order to inquire into the anecdote’s epistemico-ontological status. And I will do so by reading it in connection with Walter Benjamin’s famous essay on “The Storyteller,” as this text provides us with a context that allows us to put its status – as something “irrelevantly relevant” – into perspective.

Item Type:

Book Section (Book Chapter)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures
06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures > Literary Theory

UniBE Contributor:

Claviez, Thomas

Subjects:

800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 810 American literature in English
800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 820 English & Old English literatures

ISSN:

0340-5453

ISBN:

978-3-11-062953-8

Series:

Anglia Book Series

Publisher:

De Gruyter

Language:

English

Submitter:

Thomas Claviez

Date Deposited:

03 Jun 2021 08:24

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 15:48

Uncontrolled Keywords:

Contingency, History, Storytelling, Unity, Walter Benjamin.

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/152886

Actions (login required)

Edit item Edit item
Provide Feedback