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

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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