Can Karl Kraus 'Live Away' from Austria? Jonathan Franzen's The Kraus Project

Jonathan Franzen's 2013 translation of two major essays by the Austrian public intellectual Karl Kraus, The Kraus Project represents an intense interaction of an American popular author with German literature. What is the "Kraus Project"? Is it Karl Kraus's campaign to protect ae...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:German studies review 2019-02, Vol.42 (1), p.103-121
Main Author: Beebee, Thomas O
Format: Article
Language:eng
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Summary:Jonathan Franzen's 2013 translation of two major essays by the Austrian public intellectual Karl Kraus, The Kraus Project represents an intense interaction of an American popular author with German literature. What is the "Kraus Project"? Is it Karl Kraus's campaign to protect aesthetic culture from journalism, translated by Franzen into the present-day, Anglophone literary world? Or, is it a Franzen Project making use of Kraus to channel the American author's intellectual biography and his theories of American culture? The Kraus Project shows the same contradictions as is Franzen's creative work: it attempts to be both popular, living literature and an avant-garde experiment.
ISSN:0149-7952
2164-8646
2164-8646