Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity

Ari Linden is an assistant professor in the Department of German Studies at the University of Kansas. He is a coeditor of the forthcoming volume Karl Kraus and National Socialism: Citing Violence, Inciting Critique.

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIntroduction: Toward a Krausian Theory of Modernity1. Reciting War: The Last Days of Mankind (1915-22)2. On Birds, Wars, and Fragile Republics: Cloudcuckooland (1923)3. "Where Illegality Becomes the Law": The Third Walpurgis Night (1933/52)4. "A Monstrous Non-Entity": Kierkegaard, Kraus, and Benjamin5. "Origin is the Goal": Adorno and KrausCoda: "Shadows Cast Bodies": Kraus and PosterityBibliographyNotesIndex

Ari Linden's Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity offers an illuminating view onto Kraus's three major creative works, The Last Days of Mankind, Cloudcuckooland, and The Third Walpurgisnacht. Linden's principal contribution is an original analysis of Kraus's use of language in its relation to his contemporary reality-and in particular World War I, the creation of the Austrian Republic in the 1920s, and the era of National Socialism." - Michael W. Jennings, coauthor of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life "Ari Linden's Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity offers a compelling portrait of Kraus as a cultural critic in dark times, whose work runs parallel to other major figures of modernism. Linden offers measured assessments of Kraus's successes and limitations, his power and powerlessness, and what they offered, and continue to offer, to later generations of readers and critics." - Kirk Wetters, author of The Opinion System: Impasses of the Public Sphere from Hobbes to Habermas "Enormously erudite and enviably conversant with critical theory, Ari Linden convincingly argues that modernism cannot be fully understood without taking account of the towering - but still often neglected - figure of Karl Kraus." - William Collins Donahue, author of Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink's "Nazi Novels" and Their Films