On The Relationship Between Walter Benjamin And Siegfried Krakauer's Literary Criticism

This paper is based on the kinship of two books,Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama and Siegfried Kracauer's The Detective Novel: Philosophical Treatise,which were completed almost at the same time.Through this study,I want to discuss the identity of literature theory,and make a rough review about the current critical methods.Weimar Republic is an important period in German civilization,in which period thoughts collide fiercely.Based on the research of historical background,the study of Benjamin and Kracauer's correspondence,and close reading of the text,I aim to look for the common purpose of literature research method in a special time,and further to explore the cause of this similarity.This paper is divided into five sections.The first part is introduction,which explains the origin of this research,summarizes relevant research literature at home and abroad,and clarifies the research ideas of this paper.The second part aims to explore the political and cultural background of the writing time of The Origin of German Tragic Drama and The Detective Novel: Philosophical Treatise.From Benjamin's theological ideas,to Benjamin and Kracauer's language philosophy(especially take example with their commentary for Rosenzweig and Martin Buber's translation of German Bible),and then I will turn to a background introduction—intellectuals' political participation,and Benjamin,Kracauer's friendship with members of Frankfurt school,the theory of literature creation background and so on.The third part,starting from the texts of the two books,I try to analyze the critical methods of the two books respectively from the perspectives of epistemology and sovereign space,modern city and public security space,after determining Benjamin's concept of tragic drama and Kracauer's understanding of detective stories.The fourth part emphasizes on the relationship between Benjamin and Kracauer's literary research methods.This paper will analyze the similar structure of the two books from the perspective of the style of the two books.Then I will turn to a very critical concept—allegory.Benjamin distinguishes the classical concept of allegory from the modern and forms his own concept of allegory.Kracauer draws on Benjamin's definition of the allegory,and at the end of the second section analyses Kracauer's acceptance of Benjamin's allegory concept,as well as some subsequent echoes.Then,through two different paths of redemption,the critical ideas of Benjamin and Kracauer inevitably lead to different situations,which is the difference in their approaches.The last part,conclusion,tries to clarify the context of the whole text and find out the reasons for the similarity of literary criticism paths between the two in this period.