A great American writer's confrontation with a great European critic - a personal and intellectual awakening. A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and prophetic writers in Europe: a relentless critic of the popular media's manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though his followers included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Thankfully, Jonathan Franzen is one of them. In THE KRAUS PROJECT, Franzen not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus but annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous and difficult author, and in Franzen he has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus's often dense arguments. While Kraus lampoons the iconic German writer Heinrich Heine and celebrates his own literary heroes, Franzen's annotations soar over today's cultural landscape and then dive down into a deeply personal recollection of his first year out of college, when he fell in love with Kraus. Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, THE KRAUS PROJECT is a feast of thought, passion, and literature.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
HarperCollins
ISBN-13
9780007517442
eBay Product ID (ePID)
207542691
Product Key Features
Book Title
The Kraus Project
Author
Jonathan Franzen
Format
Paperback
Language
English
Publication Year
2014
Genre
Biographies & True Stories
Number of Pages
336 Pages
Dimensions
Item Height
198mm
Item Width
129mm
Item Weight
310g
Additional Product Features
Title_Author
Jonathan Franzen
Country/Region of Manufacture
United Kingdom
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