Evidence, experience and conjecture: reading the interior through Benjamin and Bloch

Abstract

This article looks at the resonances between Walter Benjamin's writing on the bourgeois domestic interior, and Ernst Bloch's investigation of the detective novel. These resonances hinge on the evidence that the interior registers through traces, and how these traces relate to the conjectural knowledge of detection. Explored via Carlo Ginzburg, conjectural knowledge raises the question of experience in modernity, a question crucial to understanding the role of literary narrative in the nineteenth century, as well as the historical emergence of the bourgeois domestic interior at this time