Narrativa e infância em Walter Benjamin

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the relationship between narrative, experience, and childhood based on Walter Benjamin’s thought. It begins with Benjamin’s diagnosis of the decline of storytelling in modernity, a phenomenon linked to the fragmentation of experience (Erlebnis) and the loss of its collective and transmissible dimension (Erfahrung). The study examines how the historical, technical, and social transformations of capitalist modern society have altered the conditions for authentic experience, undermining the possibility of symbolic transmission and the construction of shared meaning. In contrast to this impoverishment of experience, the research reflects on childhood as a privileged space of resistance and renewal of narrative capacity, through the singular, imaginative, and receptive experiences that characterize the child’s gaze. In this sense, childhood is understood as a philosophical and aesthetic category capable of restoring the sensitive and poetic dimension of experience, reopening paths for storytelling in times of modern impoverishment of life. Thus, the dissertation seeks to articulate Benjamin’s reflections on experience and narrative with the formative potential of childhood, highlighting its ethical, aesthetic, and educational relevance in contemporary times.