Katherine Arens Livres

Vienna's Dreams of Europe puts forward a convincing counter-narrative to the prevailing story of Austria's place in Europe since the Enlightenment. For a millennium, Austrian writers have used images of Europe and its hegemonic culture as their political and cultural reference points. Yet in discussions of Europe's nation-states, Austria appears only as an afterthought, no matter that its precursor states-the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian Empire, and Austria Hungary-represented a globalized European cultural space outside the dominant paradigm of nationalist colonialism. Austrian writers today confront reunited Europe in full acknowledgment of Austro-Hungary's multicultural heritage, which mixes various nationalities, ethnicities, and cultural forms, including ancestors from the Balkans and beyond. Challenging standard accounts of 18th- through 20th-century European imperial identity construction, Vienna's Dreams of Europe introduces a group of Austrian public intellectuals and authors who have since the 18th century construed their own public as European. Working in different terms than today's theorist-critics of the hegemonic West, Katherine Arens posits a political identity resisting two hundred years of European nationalism.

In this book Katherine Arens offers a series of case studies that redefine what 'reading culture' can mean in literary and cultural studies. The first part traces the ways in which authors borrow and rewrite literary traditions across national lines, in order to address problems in their own cultures' histories. In the second set of essays, Professor Arens illustrates how literature can cross other kinds of cultural boundaries, especially those between disciplines; for example, plotting a story as if it were on a stage allows Grillparzer to tell two simultaneous stories at odds with each other; and two artists interested in large-group art (Christo and Judy Chicago) manipulate their images as modernists to achieve different careers.

Case studies included here range from imperial stereotypes before 1900 through their adaptations in the film 1. April 2000 and today's musicals, and from the politics of representing Austria since Rebecca West up through Schorske's master narrative of the Ringstrasse.

Fritz Mauthner (1849-1923), a Jewish Austro-Hungarian author born in Bohemia, grew up in Prague, and moved to Berlin to become a noted novelist, newspaper writer, and cultural critic turned philosopher of language. He retired from public life just before World War I to pursue the philosophy and politics of language. This first extensive study of Mauthner’s popular essays and fiction traces his critiques of Wilhelminian Germany and of rising European nationalism. Mauthner dissects the era’s dominant culture, including its class-, ethnicity-, and gender-bound identity politics, judicial discrimination, ethnic nationalism, and the press. In other works, in the traditions of Naturalism, he draws on popular science to anticipate his own critique of language, echoing more famous contemporaries such as physicist Ernst Mach and biologist Ernst Haeckel and influencing authors Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Max Nordau.