Chris Hoffman

Chris is Core Lecturer in Contemporary Civilization in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. His book project, “You are the Task: Aesthetic Exercise in Literature and Philosophy after 1900,” studies how preparatory exercises in the arts and philosophy came to occupy a central role in contemporary aesthetics, centering authors like Stein, Kafka, R. Walser, Doderer, Hennings, Queneau, Arendt, Barthes, Tawada, and Groß. Further research addresses the history of the present in literary theory. “The Roadbed: Adorno, Hortense Spillers, and the Multidirectional Identity of Critical Theory” will soon appear in an edited volume on Adorno & identity, the first foray in a planned second project on the intersection of German-language critical theory and the Black Radical Tradition. He is co-editor of a special issue of Colloquia Germanica on “Arendt and Literature,” to which he contributed an article on “Arendt’s Criticism of Life.” An article on Fredric Jameson's style will appear next year in a collected volume on style in literary theory. A study constellating 1970s-era literary-theoretical studies of fascism in Jameson, Elisabeth Lenk, and Furio Jesi is in preparation.