Walter Benjamin and the meaning of experience: cordel literature in the valorization of peasant culture

Abstract

This article problematizes the crisis of experience and the decline of narrative in capitalist modernity, taking as its theoretical axis the philosophical critique of progress and instrumental rationality. Starting from the diagnosis that the capitalist mode of production generates the emptying of transmissible experiences and the disintegration of the communal sense of social life, the study analyzes the historical devaluation of the figure of the narrator and its effects on peasant cultural practices. The objective is to investigate to what extent Cordel Literature, as a form of popular art, can be philosophically understood as a cultural asset capable of preserving oral tradition and reactivating silenced collective memories. Methodologically, this is a bibliographical study grounded in the thought of Walter Benjamin, mobilizing the categories of experience (Erfahrung), lived experience (Erlebnis), narrative, and memory. The article argues that Cordel Literature holds critical potential insofar as it operates against the linear idea of progress, preserving histories of peasant struggle and resistance and challenging the processes of impoverishment of experience in contemporary capitalist society.