MAKING THINGS AND PRODUCING STORIES: EXPLICATING THE IDEAS OF ARENDT AND BENJAMIN IN THE WORK OF GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

Annotation

This article examines Hannah Arendt’s and Walter Benjamin’s views on the relationship between the creation of things and the creation of stories and their representation in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story “The Most Beautiful Drowned Man in the World”. In Vita Activa, Arendt identifies three basic human activities: labor, work, and action, the result of the last of which are the stories people tell. Even earlier, anticipating Arendt’s thoughts, Benjamin linked the decline of the art of storytelling to the replacement of craft by high-tech production in the capitalist society of modernity. In Marquez’s narrative, co-creation and its attendant stories act as a means of overcoming alienation and transforming the strange and foreign into the local and understandable. The article discusses the philosophical and sociological aspects of the concepts in question and their applicability to the solution of contemporary social problems.

Keywords

Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Gabriel García Márquez, alienation, storytelling

Literature

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