Jan Mieszkowski is a professor of German and comparative literature at Reed College. He is the author of Crises of the Sentence (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Watching War (Stanford University Press, 2012), and Labors of Imagination: Aesthetics and Political Economy from Kant to Althusser (Fordham University Press, 2006).
Jan Mieszkowski
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Writing on Public Books
E. B. White’s “Plain Style” @75
It might seem self-evident that White the author practiced what Strunk and White the style gurus preached, but the truth is more complicated.
Kafka: The Impossible Biography
The prospect of a new Kafka biography is like an invitation to a party that is bound to be entertaining but may end badly. Situating Kafka’s writing within the …
Kafka: The Impossible Biography
The prospect of a new Kafka biography is like an invitation to a party that is bound to be entertaining but may end badly. Situating Kafka’s writing …
Tales of the Interwar
Today, the once-provocative suggestion that we live in an age of interminable warfare has become a truism. The claim often takes the form of an observation about the post-9/11 syndrome that drives an endless War on Terror. Alternatively, it can become a description of our era as yet another chapter in the history of the […]
Streetwise in Weimar
Scholars of Weimar Germany have long wrestled with the fact that this period of unparalleled innovation in intellectual and cultural life was a time of economic and social crisis, brought to a close by one of the greatest political catastrophes in human history. Framed by this intimate conjunction of triumph and tragedy, the analysis of […]
The Correctionists
One of the most widespread diseases is diagnosis. —Karl Kraus For an American audience, the first reaction to the publication of Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project is presumably: who is Karl Kraus? A quick survey reveals only a handful of English-language translations of this Viennese author, who lived from 1874 to 1936. Even academics with […]
War Stories
Today anyone with a computer or smart phone can access videos of armed conflicts from around the world. Battles that would once have been shared days, years, or even generations after the fact, via newsreels, books, or folksongs, are now available for immediate consumption anywhere, anytime. But is anyone watching? Recent wars have proven to […]
