Marion GablNow largely forgotten, Karl Kraus was one of the most incisive and provocative cultural commentators of early twentieth-century Vienna. He's also a literary hero of Jonathan Franzen, one of the most successful American novelists active today. In his ambitious latest book, Franzen sets out to recover the forgotten Kraus for contemporary readers. But his interest isn't simply historical: he also hopes to show that Kraus has a cure for the problems of our postmodern condition. Does he succeed? Marion Gabl reviews the effort.
Filed under Book Reviews, Featured Essays · Tagged with aesthetics, anti-modernism, Austria, feuilleton, Germany, Jonathan Franzen, Karl Kraus, literary criticism, literature, Modernity, technology, turn of the century, Vienna, World War I
Vigen Guroian
During a dinner conversation with Russell and Annette Kirk in Washington, D.C., just five months before Dr. Kirk’s death, Russell turned to me and quipped, with his familiar chuckle and impish smile, “Vigen, they are now calling me a theologian!” I did not ask him who was saying such a thing...
Filed under Articles / Essays, Featured Essays, Uncategorized · Tagged with Christian Humanism, Christopher Dawson, Edmund Burke, G.K. Chesterton, humanism, Irving Babbitt, John Dewey, John Henry Newman, literature, Orestes Brownson, Pico della Miranola, Richard Hooker, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, theology, Vigen Guroian, William F. Buckley Jr.
Russell Kirk
For decades now, mainstream educators have been encouraging their pupils to use their imaginations - even as the literary fare they've been offering has increasingly had the opposite effect. Russell Kirk brings his characteristic perspicacity to bear on the question of literature and the "moral imagination" in a classic essay that has only grown more relevant since it first appeared in 1981.
