East and West in the Writings of Karl Emil Franzos
Recent theory about the imperial discourse produced in travel literature have suggested the importance of the frontier in imperial literary illustrations of contact between metropolitan, European culture and foreign culture and how it strengthened the idea of the limits of Europe and European culture for the western reading public. The project builds on this recent scholarship by investigating the works of Karl Emil Franzos (1848-1904), whose literary ethnographic sketches and travel writings in the Aus Halb-Asien trilogy (1876-88) on the life, culture, and homeland of Eastern Europe and especially Eastern European Jews in the Habsburg rural province of Galicia assumed a significant role in the liberal Austrian attitude of "civilizing" the untamed East through German cultural influence. To this extent, Franzos reflected a 19th century Jewish assimilationist view of the importance of German enlightened humanism to "westernize" the Eastern European Jewry on the frontier of the Austrian Empire.
MA, PhD, geb. 1975 in North Carolina, studierte am Simon's Rock College, am Bard College und an der University of Chicago German Language and Literature und German Studies; zahlreiche Fellowships, erhielt 1995 den Wilton Moore Lockwood Prize for Critical Writing; 1996 Auslandsstudium an der Universität Mainz.
Mechanical Ballet in: The Preston Review (Bard College, 1994).