TY - JOUR AU - ROJAS, CARLOS PY - 2015/07/31 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - WRITING ON THE WALL: BENJAMIN, KAFKA, BORGES, AND THE CHINESE IMAGINARY JF - 452ºF. Revista de Teoría de la literatura y Literatura Comparada JA - 452ºF VL - 0 IS - 13 SE - Monográfico DO - UR - https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/452f/article/view/14132 SP - 71-81 AB - <p>Using Kafka’s short story “The Great Wall of China” as a starting point, this essay examines the ways in which a dialectics of inclusion and exclusion, construction and destruction, have been deployed in discussions of identity and difference. In particular, I argue that even as Walter Benjamin uses Kafka as a starting point to reflect on how the West imagines China as a space of radical alterity, Kafka’s own Great Wall story is interested instead in how China conceives its relationship to <em>its own</em> strategic Other, which in turn offers a model for how we might understand the West itself.</p> ER -