Critical Theory and Literature. Crisis of Experience and Literary Montage

• Grant number: 24/09626-4
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: August 01, 2025
• End date: July 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Lucianno Ferreira Gatti
• Grantee: Lucianno Ferreira Gatti
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The research project aims to update a diagnosis of the crisis of experience, developed in the field of Critical Theory, through the investigation of contemporary literary works characterized by the combination of distinct artistic means. The theoretical framework of the project is provided by a dialectic of experience investigated by Walter Benjamin, according to which modern art, at least since Baudelaire, has been constituted as a consequence and reflection on the unfeasibility of experience in its traditional forms. In this sense, confronting the obstacles to experience becomes the privileged way to construct an experience in a strong sense in modernity. The project intends to investigate one of the artistic consequences of this confrontation, namely, the production of works of art based on montage techniques. According to Benjamin, montage, while being refractory to notions commonly associated with traditional experience, such as organicity and continuity, has shown itself to be an effective and technically advanced instrument for problematizing the possibility of experience in its collective and political sense. Based on such a dialectic of montage and experience, the present project has as its object a set of literary works that bring into focus the issue of experience through the montage of image and text. In this case, the aim is to investigate aspects of the literary work of the German writer W. G. Sebald, which challenges the autonomy of artistic means such as literary prose and photography. According to the hypothesis of the research project, the montage of images and text operated by Sebald would be a solution found by the author to deal with the problem of the literary presentation of events from the history of the 20th century that challenge the concept of experience. (AU)