Dr. Ari Linden

Ari Linden
  • Associate Professor
  • Director of Undergraduate Studies
  • German Jewish thought and literature | The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory | 20th c. German and Austrian literary and visual culture | Literatures and philosophies of exile | Theories of comedy and satire
he/him/his

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Biography —

Ari Linden earned his PhD in German Studies from Cornell University in 2013 and began his career at the University of Kansas that fall. Ari enjoys teaching a wide range of courses on modern German culture and the German language. His recent monograph, Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity (Northwestern University Press, 2020), treats the twentieth-century Austrian satirist Karl Kraus as a critical yet overlooked theorist of modernity, as it re-envisions Kraus as an interlocutor of Søren Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. Ari has also published articles and book chapters on Walter Benjamin, Else Lasker-Schüler, Bertolt Brecht, G.W.F. Hegel, and Leo Strauss. His current project, tentatively titled On the Dialectics of Exile, will examine literary and philosophical treatments of exile in the modern German and German Jewish literary and philosophical tradition.

Education —

Ph.D. in German Studies, Cornell University, 2013
M.A. in German Studies, Cornell University, 2009

Research —

Research interests:

  • German Jewish thought and literature
  • The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory
  • Twentieth-century German and Austrian literary and visual culture
  • Literatures and philosophies of exile
  • Theories of comedy and satire

Selected Publications —

Linden, Ari. Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity. Northwestern University Press, 2020.

Linden, Ari. “‘Teaching to Interrupt: Satire in Brecht’s Arturo Ui and Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.’” The Brecht Yearbook, vol. 41, Nov. 2017, pp. 23–42.

Linden, Ari. “Thinking Through the Clouds: Comedy in Hegel and Strauss.” The German Quarterly, vol. 90, no. 4, 2017, pp. 423–38.

Linden, Ari. “‘“Wo Das Ungesetz Gesetzlich Überwaltet”: Karl Kraus’s Reading of National Socialism.’” Oxford German Studies, edited by Helena Tomko, vol. 46, no. 1, 2017, pp. 75–91.

Linden, Ari. “Staging German-Jewish Exile in Else Lasker-Schüler’s IchundIch.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, vol. 60, no. 1, Oxford Journals, Nov. 2015.

Selected Presentations —

Linden, A. (11/30/2017). From Black Magic to Jargon: Adorno's Dialogue with Kraus. Citing Violence, Inciting Critique: Karl Kraus, 1933. University of Antwerp (Belgium)

Linden, A. (2/28/2017). Thinking through the Remainder: Negative Dialektik as a Work of German Jewish Thought. 5th Biennial Meeting of the German Jewish Studies Workshop. Notre Dame University

Linden, A. (10/31/2016). Authorship and Authority in Arendt, Kierkegaard, and Benjamin. 40th Annual German Studies Association Conference. San Diego, CA

Awards & Honors —

Hall Center Humanities Research Fellowship

Hall Center for the Humanities

2017