The age of industrialization ushered in new ways of disseminating and creating art. Technological innovation is accompanied by the anxious reservations of aesthetic purists. These reservations come from a distrust of the dehumanizing effect of mechanical reproduction and a feeling of powerlessness in the face of the work of art in its mediated form. In the aftermath of the printing press, writers and artists struggled to understand this new phenomenon and its effects on the creation of texts. Two texts, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Walter Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility" reflect this with regard to technology and its effects on the art of writing. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay In his essay, Benjamin focuses on how the form of art and its reception has changed in the age of technological reproduction. It also evaluates the effects of this new artistic medium on an increasingly evolving audience. Simply put, mechanical reproducibility allowed the proliferation of copies of works of art. This dissolved the validity of the concept of originality in art. There is a rejection of the traditional functions of art in favor of new and more expansive functions. Art is now a product of mass consumption and is losing its unique character, its “aura”. Benjamin's discussion of authenticity is interesting for what it implies about the power of an original. He begins by stating: “the presence of the original is the prerequisite for the notion of authenticity”. (220) Authenticity therefore depends on the existence of an original, the starting point against which all other reproductions will be measured. All authority flows from this authenticity. This is how art has traditionally been valued. This reliance on the original for authority has implications in terms of the “authenticity” of art that bears no original. The implication is that once the original is lost or destroyed, so is the authority. The definition of authenticity also depends on its assumption of history and tradition. “The authenticity of a thing,” Benjamin explains, “is the essence of everything that is transmissible from its origin, from its substantial duration to its testimony of the history it has lived. » (221) Authenticity is linked to the lifespan of the work of art. This is the “testimony” it gives to its sustainability. In this sense, the work of art is an artifact, a relic of past eras, bearing the combinations of historical and social contexts that it has survived. The characters in Dracula share a similar view of delegating authority to an original. If Dracula can be considered the original, then Mina and the gentlemen who help her destroy Dracula represent mechanical reproducibility. Their insistence on eradicating Dracula despite the risk involved stems from a pure belief in the power of the original. They believe that once they destroy Dracula, they will purge the world of evil and the many vampires he spawned. He is the original “auratic”; once destroyed, so will its authority and authenticity. In describing the need to kill Dracula, Van Helsing emphasizes his uniqueness. "With this one, all the forces of nature that are occult, deep and strong must have worked together in a wonderful way." (319) This vampire, more than any other “Undeath”, managed to survive for centuries thanks to combinations of the “occult” forces of nature. He is the original who carries in his blood all the marks of history and tradition. Its authority derives from its authenticity and the “testimony” of its history in its existence. THEVampire hunters are determined to eradicate their authentic original. Their methods involve technology and the reproduction of texts. According to Benjamin, authority is based on tradition. Two processes lead to a "breakdown of tradition" (221), the substitution of copies for the original and the proximity of the spectator to the reproduction. These two developments undermine the traditional functions of art. This breakup of tradition seems to be a good thing. He describes it as "a renewal of humanity." (221) By compiling and reproducing texts about their adventures, Dracula's characters replace Dracula with copies in the same way that technological reproduction usurps. the authority of the original by virtue of its medium, so do the vampires. The fact that Benjamin calls this a "revival of tradition" is also how Van Helsing describes their mission. The value of art therefore rests on the. public perception of it. As art becomes more and more detached from its tradition, it becomes more attached to its public. This is because something is lost in the age of. technological reproducibility: the “aura” of the object. He does not provide a definition of this term, but rather describes it as part of an experience of "the unique phenomenon of distance, however close it can be." » (223) Aura is the desire for proximity to a work of art while simultaneously maintaining distance. The aura is therefore a product of distance, or of the audience's perception of distance. The distance is caused by the uniqueness of the object. With the advent of mechanical reproducibility, this uniqueness dissolved. In the same way, the characters in Dracula dissolve Dracula's singularity by creating a text about him and then copying that text. They bridge the gap between this character and their life by replacing it with a text from themselves. It is their voices, not Dracula's, that the reader knows through the text. The aura, and Dracula, are lost because there is no longer any distance; the audience and characters in the book are empowered through mechanical reproduction. The dissipation of the aura is the product of what Benjamin sees as the evolution of the audience. In this vein, his observations have been described as "anthropological" rather than philosophical. He describes this audience as “masses”. Modern audiences don't care about preserving authenticity. The “masses” want to bridge the differences created by uniqueness. It is “the desire of the contemporary masses to bring things together spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their tendency to overcome the uniqueness of everyday reality by accepting its reproduction.” (223) The “masses” want instant gratification. They no longer appreciate the distance that a work of art offers them. By accepting its reproduction, they overcome the uniqueness that distance represents. Aura withering also has another benefit for audiences: the increased opportunity to participate in this new medium. Regarding printing and the participation it allows, writes Benjamin. With the increasing spread of the press, which constantly placed new political, religious, scientific, professional and local organs before readers, a growing number of readers first became writers: occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening up to its readers a space for “letters to the editor”. And today, there is no European in paid employment who cannot, in principle, find the opportunity to publish somewhere? The distinction between author and audience is thus on the verge of losing its fundamental character. (232) The printing press made it possible for anyone, from the educated intellectual to the "paidly employed European", to becomeauthor. The proliferation of printed texts has the effect of blurring the distinctions between public and author. The public of readers now becomes the public of writers. By abandoning tradition, humanity was “renewed”, but at the cost of its aura. The printing press destroyed the aura but it also generated the energy necessary to write for an audience that was denied access to artistic creation for other reasons. These characters are a good example of thisphenomenon. Jonathan Harker fully deserves the title of “Paidly Employed European”. His diary, written in shorthand, the most technical form of English, forms the basis of the text. The characters also blur the distinctions between author and audience because they each play both roles. They compose the text and are the only readers. They constitute their own audience. Stoker problematizes this relationship with the printed text. Dracula celebrates these new techniques of disseminating and organizing information, but those who use them seem comical in their almost religious zeal to use these tools. Mina, the embodiment of this phenomenon of compulsive typing and copying, remarks: "I am very grateful to the man who invented the traveler's typewriter and to Mr. Morris for buying this one for me." work if I had to write with a pen. (350) She writes this while she and Van Helsing are in the middle of Dracula's exotic and foreign land. It is filled with superstitious natives and lacks any type of technological innovation. His only joy is using a machine, this "traveler's typewriter", the only vestige of the nascent manufacturing industry which invaded Europe and transformed Western culture. A pen, itself a means of human presence, would have made Mina feel “quite lost.” The only way to organize and transmit information is to use this machine. The use of mechanical production to disseminate information is fetishized for Mina and, by extension, for modern culture. Benjamin describes this dependence on producibility as the genesis of a time when art will no longer be the same. The loss of aura may constitute a “renewal of humanity,” but it is not a good development for art. Stoker addresses this fear in this passage. Mina, losing her humanity and becoming a vampire, relies heavily on the typewriter and its dehumanizing effects. The quill, although still a mediated form, displays the uniqueness of human presence in handwriting. Humanity then begins to reflect the mechanisms of production by becoming systematic and exact. This reflects the influence of modernity on writing. Relics of modernity litter the novel: there are Kodak cameras, cyclists, messengers carrying telegrams, Winchesters, etc. Technology is an ever-present force in their world. They appreciate it for its destructive goals, but they are also impressed by it. These vampire hunters feel the need to record everything as accurately as possible. By recording these supernatural events using these mechanical tools, these English characters maintain control over a force that renders them increasingly powerless. Seward says at one point: "Jonathan Harker asked me to note this, as he says he is hardly up to the task, and he wishes an accurate record to be kept." » (329) Harker, like Mina, reveres the act of recording and organizing information. This desperate attempt to keep an "accurate record" seems to be the only way to conquer Dracula. Like the original, Dracula must be destroyed through technology, by methodically recording and systematizing his movements and the history of events. The Vampire Huntersseem to crave and foster this disembodied communication. They don't hesitate to use all these new and advanced gadgets. The letters between Lucy and Mina, the diaries, the mechanically reproduced voice of Sewards - everything is compiled into a single text. Mina, in the name of expediency and the noble cause, assimilates all these traces of human presence in numerous copies of a typewritten manuscript. Their words, now in the form of uniform characters, are devoid of any mark of individuality or human origin. Mina is the printing press and Dracula is her text, literally and figuratively. In reflecting his ambivalence toward modernity, Dracula also resists any type of careful analysis. The text itself is complex and ambiguous and requires the reader to see both perspectives of this phenomenon. In "Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media" Jennifer Wicke comments on Dracula's use of modern media to both compose and destroy himself. “What makes this text so modern,” she explains, “is that he knows that it will be consumed, he stages the very act of his own consumption and problematizes it.” (491) The book is a very self-aware text. He knows that it is the product of mass reproduction, but he can also maintain a critical eye on the process. Stoker's very act of writing the book and the events that took place there seem an endorsement of technological reproducibility. It is the group's thoroughness and undying loyalty to recording the text that helps them destroy and eradicate Dracula. The text addresses the fear of technology but it also affirms the need to technologize information. When Dracula attempts to hinder his hunters by burning the diaries and phonograph records, they are relieved to learn that there is still a copy of the manuscript in the safe. Of this incident, Wicke writes, "this fortuitous recovery of their works, as well as of the text held in the reader's hand, arises only too ironically from a copy." If copying is the inevitable fate of the mass-produced product, here it is also salvation. (490) The reader must now recognize that his text is a copy of a copy. The originals have been destroyed, but the text still retains its authority. The existence of the text as a copy from the archives of a methodical group of Britons pays tribute to their tenacity as writers and recorders. If Dracula is the original possessing the aura, this text is the modern version, possessing its own auratic qualities. In his essay, Wicke shows that there is a connection between "the sexy act of vamping and the mundane work" of typing. (467) In the same way that a vampire sucks the life out of its victims, typewriters blend all the human voices in the text into a single, uniform, dehumanized form. Count Dracula is analogous to the social force of mass culture: “the development of media technologies in its many forms, such as mass transportation…image production and mass-produced narrative.” (469) The text speaks of the consumption and use of these new media, vampiric as they may be, in the production of texts. Mina, through her use of new media, consumes Dracula through the text and becomes its author. Wicke comments that after Dracula bites Mina, she "consumes him too but without lust, desire and with her cognitive faculties intact". Still as sane as she is, Mina still maintains self-awareness amidst the consumption of and Dracula. In fact, she seems to possess a deeper understanding of Dracula's whereabouts and has more authority in the text. Wicke comments that "Mina becomes more and more the author of the text; she takes up huge sections of her narration, she..