Talk:Chris Kraus (American writer)

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Improvements Needed

This page needs attention and substantial work. I am trying to clean it up so that it looks more like a standard article rather than a series of opinions by various editors. This has necessitated a lot of interestingly written but largely unsourced content. Would strongly encourage editors to search for and incorporate more secondary material.Boredintheevening (talk) 21:35, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

Works

I removed all of the following, and bring it here for discussion.

I Love Dick is an epistolary novel. The text, a series of love letters to an elusive addressee, is anchored firmly in a tradition that can be traced back through Derrida's La Carte Postale, the letters of Madame de Sévigné (and their immense influence on Marcel Proust), Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the letters of Héloise and Abelard, as well as art concret and the confrontational performance art of the 1970s. Its implicit conceit is the connection between the novel (in French, le roman and romance: I Love Dick manages to be both a sincere lover's cry and a feminist manifesto, while at the same time destroying the bourgeois novel once and for all. I Love Dick's narrator invents a genre she names, variously, "The Dumb Cunt's Tale", "lonely girl phenomenology", and "performative philosophy", treating, among many other subjects, the paintings of R.B. Kitaj, the correspondence of Flaubert and Louise Colet, the activism of Jennifer Harbury, and Felix Guattari's Chaosophy while deconstructing the institution of marriage and the life of the mind.

"Because most 'serious' fiction, still, involves the fullest possible expression of a single person's subjectivity, it's considered crass and amateurish not to 'fictionalize' the supporting cast of characters, changing names and inisignificant features of their identites. The 'serious' contemporary hetero-male novel is a thinly veiled Story of Me, as voraciously consumptive as all of patriarchy. While the hero/anti-hero explicitly is the authpr. everybody else is reduced to "characters." Example: the artist Sophie Calle appears in Paul Auster's book Leviathan in the role of writer's girlfriend. 'Maria was far from beautiful but there was an intensity in her gray eyes that attracted me.' Maria's work is identical to Calle's most famous pieces--the address book, hotel photos, etc.--but in Leviathan she's a waif-like creature relieved of complications like ambition or career.

When women try to pierce this false conceit by naming names because our 'Is are changing as we meet other 'Is, we're called bitches, libellers, pornographers, and amateurs."

Eileen Myles writes, "Chris' ultimate achievement is philosophical. She's turned female abjection inside out and aimed it at a man. As if her decades of experience were both a painting and a weapon. As if she, a hag, a kike, a poet, a failed filmmaker, a former go-go dancer--an intellectual, a wife, as if she had the right to go right up to the end of the book and live having felt all that. I Love Dick boldly suggests that Chris Kraus' unswervingly attempted and felt female life is a total work and it didn't kill her."

Some say that I Love Dick is not fiction piggy-backed on non-fiction or vice versa, but a sustained critique of the laziness of its readers.

Aliens and Anorexia Perhaps Kraus's wildest novel, Aliens and Anorexia zooms back and forth in time and location, tracing the life and activism of Ulrike Meinhof, the downtown theatre scene in late seventies New York, the drug experiments of Aldous Huxley, the paintings and writings of Paul Thek, through the narrator Chris's fruitless attempts to make and sell a feature film, "Gravity and Grace", (which takes its title from the Simone Weil volume of the same name). Turning the "I" of I Love Dick even further outward, Kraus writes, "Sartre thinks that those who experience an intolerable situation through their bodies are manipulative cowards. It's inconceivable to him that female pain can be impersonal." Aliens and Anorexia is a kind of archaeology of embodied suffering, following the narrator's Crohn's disease back to Simone Weil's activist mortifications and eventual death by starvation. "All her life," Kraus writes, "Simone Weil suffered viscerally from the collapse of beauty. Without justice and the harmony of social life that it implies, there can be no beauty." And, "Food's a product of the culture and the cynicism of it makes me sick." Further on, "Weil as the anorexic philosopher... Though Friedrich Nietzsche suffered blinding headaches, The Gay Science is not interpreted as a Philosophy of Headaches." A hunger for understanding afflicts the novel's many characters, from a struggling artist in downtown New York who can't bear to eat to New Zealanders who congregate to contact aliens. The real aliens are Simone Weil and a choir of woman radical heroes, none of them saints because none of them, to paraphrase Kraus, loses her intelligence.

Video Green A series of 23 essays written between 1998 and 2003, mostly in her column "Torpor" in the magazine Artext, Video Green is dense with the literary, the personal, and the culturally marginal, like all of Kraus's writing. A few of the collection's notable essays not about L.A. include the elegaic "Posthumous Lives", about the performance artist Penny Arcade's loving curation of the estate of the filmmaker Jack Smith, and "How to Shoot a Crime," about Kraus's 1987 film of the same name. The volume's first essay and its lengthiest, "Art Collection" echoes both Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library" and Wallace Stevens's "Prelude to Objects". The essay finds that "Collecting, in its most primitive form, implies a deep belief in the primacy and mystery of the object, as if the object was a wild thing. As if it had a meaning and a weight that was inherent, primary, that overrode attempts to classify it. As if the object didn't function best as a blank slate waiting to be written on by curatorial practice and art criticsm." Reading texts on collecting and abjection, Kraus states, "We are witnessing a daily life that's so contemptible and trite that pornography becomes its only appropriate rejoinder." She follows the idea of collecting through L.A.'s M.F.A. art scene and real estate market, ending up in rural upstate New York with the extraordinary poetry--and art collection--of the all-but forgotten William Bronk.

Torpor follows Jerome Shafir, a literature professor at Columbia, his wife, Sylvie Green, a writer and filmmaker with an inconclusive career, and their dog Lily through rustbelt New York, Paris, Berlin, and the Eastern Bloc at the dawn of the New World Order. As much a shattering portrait of Holocaust survivor as portrait of a marriage, Torpor is also the portrait of a lady rarely found in literature: a down-and-out intellectual bearing witness to a culture in collapse.

In Torpor, Kraus shifts out of the first-person narration of I Love Dick, employing a kind of free-indirect discourse that has led many reviewers to compare her style and devastating irony to that of Flaubert. In naming her central characters Sylvie and Jerome, Kraus alludes to the hapless, interchangeable protagonists of George Perec's first novel, Les Choses. Perec, a childhood friend of both Torpor's Jerome and Kraus's real-life husband, Sylvère Lotringer, is quoted several times in the novel. Felix Guattari and Nan Goldin also make appearances, among other cultural figures, though Kraus's use of "reality" comes to more subversive effect than a simple roman à clef.

All of this was added by one editor, and it reads like a book review. None of this is referenced, and one gets the impression that these are the editors personal thoughts and interpretations on the work. As such, it is inappropriate. Certainly, the article should have discussion of Kraus's writings, but it should include the opinions of critics, not of Wikipedia editors. ---RepublicanJacobite_{The'FortyFive'} 16:13, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Birthday?

I came here to get to know the background of Chris Kraus and would've liked to know when she was born, actually. 85.181.38.132 (talk) 17:07, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Hopefully I've addressed the issue here. But as one of the cited sites was removed here, I'm not 100 percent sure it will stick. Maybe @TruthnEvant: can share some light on the current state of verifiability around these sources/facts. All the best.--Paracel63 (talk) 10:14, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

Cleanup

This has been addressed previously on the talk page, but this article is in serious need of some rewriting. Particularly in the "works" section, the claims made about some of the novels appear to be opinion based, but are unreferenced and quite possibly original research and analysis of the novels. Take, for instance, this sentence: "As much a shattering portrait of a Holocaust survivor as portrait of a marriage, Torpor is also the portrait of a lady rarely found in literature: a down-and-out intellectual bearing witness to a culture in collapse." The grandiose writing is almost suitable for an advertisement, and the claim "a lady rarely found in literature" isn't proven through attribution. Unfortunately, I don't have enough experience with Kraus's work to properly rewrite this, so I've decided to tag the page as "written like an advertisement" and "original research" in the hopes that someone familiar with the subject can help. Nanophosis (talk) 14:27, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

Appropriateness of "Works"?

It seems that this page reads more like "Bibliography of Chris Kraus" than an actual article about her or her life. I think it would be fair to remove most of the excesses about the books, and add some additional biographical details. It seems especially important to include biographic detail given the degree to which her fiction is derived from her life. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ctbeiser (talk • contribs) 03:01, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Current Works?

Kraus is currently publishing a book called The Four Spent The Day Together. The book is being published in installments (each a few months apart) on Pioneer Works.

Would it be relevant to add a work that is still in progress to her current bibliography? The installment releases are official (intentional) and not sneak-peaks, but seeing the somewhat messy state of the article, I wonder if it would be best to wait until other issues have been addressed before adding more information in a format that would later be changed (i.e. creating more work for the editor of the entire article instead of waiting until the final format is in place). Norobase27 (talk) 17:46, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

Removal of "landlord" from infobox

A while ago, I noted in the infobox that Kraus is a landlord in addition to being an author and filmmaker.

This was removed by newly registered wikipedia user @Chriskraus2068, a newly registered account who it appears may be the subject of the article. No rationale was given.

That Kraus is a landlord is documented amply in the article now, so I am adding it back. Feel free to undo and dispute if there is reason to believe that this fact has since changed. Ctbeiser (talk) 06:12, 3 October 2022 (UTC)