Critical Theory and Literature: Crises of Experience and Literaty Montage.

• Grant number: 24/18050-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: December 01, 2025
• End date: February 28, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Lucianno Ferreira Gatti
• Grantee: Lucianno Ferreira Gatti
• Host Investigator: Georg W. Bertram
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

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 media. The theoretical framework of the project is grounded in a dialectic of experience as explored by Walter Benjamin, according to which modern art, at least since Baudelaire, is constituted as a consequence and reflection on the viability of experience in its traditional forms. In this sense, confronting the obstacles to experience becomes the privileged way to construct a strong sense of experience in modernity. The project intends to investigate one of the artistic consequences of this confrontation, namely, the production of artworks through montage techniques. According to Benjamin, montage, while resistant to notions commonly associated with traditional experience, such as organicity and continuity, has proven to be an effective and technically advanced tool for problematizing the possibility of experience in its collective and political sense. Based on this dialectic of montage and experience, the present project focuses on a set of literary works that highlight the issue of experience through the montage of image and text. Specifically, it investigates aspects of the literary work of the German writer W. G. Sebald, which challenges the autonomy of artistic media such as literary prose and photography. According to the hypothesis of the research project, the montage of image and text employed by Sebald represents a solution found by the author to address the problem of the literary presentation of events from the history of the twentieth century that challenge the concept of experience.