Considering Language Poetry Movement in Relation to Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art Essay

Zhe Huang

College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China

Abstract: This essay takes Walter Benjamin’s most influential essay “The work of art in the age of mechani-cal reproduction” as the starting point of the discussion of one prominent American avant-garde literary movement - the Language poetry movement and its political aims. What Benjamin has theorized in the es-say about film and photography - the decay of aura, the changed mode of perception in relation to mechanical reproduction, and the effects of shock and distraction-can be analogously applied to modernist literature in the modern condition. With new forms of sentences and literary structures, the modernist “open text” should be perceived in a different light from the realist “closed text”, and the reader’s participation is crucial to the process of the construction of meaning, which bears a political significance for the Language poets. The essay discusses the way that Language poetry uses fragmentation to invite reader response, meanwhile addresses the challenges that Language poetry and all avant-gardist literature face when fragmentation has become a literary device anticipated by the modern reader.

Keywords: Walter Benjamin; Language poetry; Participatory aesthetics; Art and politics