hessel

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/flaneur-franz-hessel-objectivity-weimar-berlin/"></div><p>By <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/amanda-demarco">Amanda DeMarco</a> and <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/daniel-liu">Daniel Liu</a></p>
<p>“Walking slowly down bustling streets is a particular pleasure. Awash in the haste of others, it’s a dip in the surf,” Franz Hessel&#8217;s 1929 <em>Walking in Berlin </em>opens with a celebration of the pedestrian&#8217;s-eye-view. Hessel was a Francophile who played a path-breaking role in bringing the concept of the flâneur to the streets of Berlin. In the essays that follow, Hessel traverses a good portion of the city, describing everything that passes before him. The result is an invaluable record of life in the city, one that Walter Benjamin called “an absolutely epic book whose source was not memory but rather leisure.” <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/flaneur-franz-hessel-objectivity-weimar-berlin/#more-4493" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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A Flâneur, But So What?: Franz Hessel and Objectivity in Weimar Berlin

frontier

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/xue-generis-can-xue-dangers-literary-exceptionalism/"></div><p>By <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/amanda-demarco">Amanda DeMarco</a></p>
<p>&#8220;Can Xue’s works are truly exceptional,” Can Xue assures us. China’s most prominent author of experimental fiction is known, among other things, for talking about herself in the third person using her pseudonym, which means “dirty snow.” Her works inhabit a space of connected disjointedness somewhere between Diane Williams and <em>Nadirs</em>-era Herta Müller. Think Mikhail Shishkin’s <em>Maidenhair </em>politically unmoored. Hers is generally not a strangeness of voice or syntax — this is neither Woolf of <em>The Waves</em>, nor McBride’s <em>A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. </em>Rather its strangeness resides in the world, or at least in what the speaker notices about it. Her works are usually related in a simple style that ranges from elegantly plainspoken to abrupt. There are halting arcs of narrative, rumor, causation; clues as well as red herrings. It has all of the bones of storytelling, but often lacks the connective tissue, leaving the deductive work to the reader, along with a much harder sort of work: the struggle to accept and comprehend things that don’t make sense. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/xue-generis-can-xue-dangers-literary-exceptionalism/#more-3962" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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Xue Generis: Can Xue and the Dangers of Literary Exceptionalism

Amanda DeMarco is a translator of German and French literature and philosophy.

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Photo: Anastasia Muna.

Amanda DeMarco

<div>Dr. Daniel Liu is a historian of science who writes about protoplasm, colloids, scientific materialism, and the uses of images in scientific exploration. He is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Biohumanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow during Summer 2017 at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.</div>

Daniel Liu

Paul Scheerbart and the Art of Science

"The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not." — Gertrude Stein

Science &amp; Technology

"The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it." — Frank Herbert

The Weight of Things

A Fortress of Solitude

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

Translator’s Note

"Writing only leads to more writing." — Colette

Literary Criticism

Susan Sontag

Finding Susan

<p>"I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead." — Samuel Goldwyn</p>