The poet as leader and the critic as strategist

Abstract

Based on a precise historical context (the early 1930s), this article aims to investigatethe repercussions of Walter Benjamin’s statement that “The critic is the strategist in the literary battle” (“One-way Street”). Taking as references, on the one hand, the rise of National Socialism in Germany, and, on the other hand, Benjamin’s relations with four other authors (Brecht, Kommerell, Adorno and Scholem), I try to think the possibility for literary criticism to operate simultaneously as a subjective record (discursive dissemination of a subject’s characteristics) and as a political register (claiming a position regarding historical facts that are contemporary with the subject in question). It is an investigation on literary criticism of that period as practiced by Walter Benjamin, as a “dialectical treatment of the authoritarian commentary form” (Erdmut Wizisla).

Keywords: Walter Benjamin; literary history; literary criticism.