Source
Prosopisia: An International Journal of Poetry & Creative WritingVolume
13Issue
2Pagination
92 - 104Publisher
Academy of raite*(s) And World LiteratiPlace of publication
Ajmer, IndiaISSN
0974-1011eISSN
0974-1011Language
engResearch statement
“On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz. The date is now consecrated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, as the world vowed never to allow murderous anti-Semitism to recur. Yet 75 years later, attacking Jews has once again become socially acceptable in many countries—across the left-right ideological spectrum, and among different groups that blame Jews for their grievances and oppression” (Walter Reich, The Atlantic, January 27 2020). Few short stories have been written about anti-Semitism in recent years. “An Aura Nothing Out of the Ordinary” explores the relationship between anti-Semitism and a very significant Australian thematic: the sale of real estate. The title is a deliberate nod to Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The ordinary aura of my story, rich with resonances of the unique and un-reproducible aura Benjamin evokes, is a mechanism for capturing a slide from the alienation of people and things co-extensive with anti-Semitism to an appreciation of the original richness of things. As Geoff Boucher notes in Adorno Reframed (I. B. Tauris, 2013), “When rational calculation is placed in the service of an economic system that regards everything in monetary terms, it must… treat its objects, including human beings, as things…. [Thus] the perfected calculations of the Nazi’s administrative apparatus.” Real estate however, over-written by capitalism, is simultaneously an opportunity for connection to place by communities. Its aura may be nothing out of the ordinary, or extraordinary. My story makes a similar point about household objects (such as plasma television sets) and (reproduced) works of art. That is, it investigates the adornments of place, of various auras, that further enable place’s (de-)commodification. The story aims to add to knowledge about the causes of (contemporary) anti-Semitism. It is published in the “International Journal of Poetry & Creative Writing:” Prosopisia.Publication classification
J2 Minor original creative work
