Round 6: Tossup 18

A “last” version of this figure titles an Afrofuturist film about a time-traveling “Data Thief” by John Akomfrah. A modern-day Hansel describes this figure to Gretel, a cocktail waitress, in Laurie Anderson’s song “The Dream Before.” This figure is called “immortal” in a chapter that originally ended Imagined Communities. An essay claims that (-5[1])this “fixedly contemplating” figure (15[1])faces a storm “blowing from Paradise.” “Where we perceive a (*) chain of events,” this figure sees a “single catastrophe… piling wreckage upon wreckage” according to that (10[1])1940 essay, which (10[1])opens by describing the Mechanical Turk and was written shortly before its author’s suicide to avoid the Nazis. For 10 points, Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” re-envisions the subject of a Paul Klee monoprint as what winged figure? ■END■ (0[3])

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