In Add it Up filmmaker and author Chris Kraus writes about the moment in 1957, when David Rattray, junkie, poet and translator, back then living in Paris, starts translating Antonin Artaud. Rattray decided to become Artaud. He consulted the cataloging system of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and read every single book checked by Artaud.

This seminar is not about (becoming) Chris Kraus. But about the becoming of ‘Chris Kraus.’ To be more precise: The ‘Chris Kraus’ of her novel I Love Dick (1997). “Everything that happens in it [I Love Dick] happened first in life,” Kraus wrote in the Guardian in May 2016, “but that doesn’t mean that it’s a memoir.”

Built upon a series of letters addressed to ‘Dick’ and written by ‘Chris’ and ‘Sylvère,’ the book wasn’t too well received in the late 1990s, but has become a cult classic and is now being made into a TV series for Amazon (dir. by Jill Soloway).

Together with the philosopher Sylvère Lotringer, her husband from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, Chris Kraus co-edited several books for the publishing house Semiotext(e), a vehicle for introducing ‘French Theory’ in the United States. Balancing out the theory driven Foreign Agents series including authors like Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Virilio, and Felix Guattari, Kraus’ Native Agents fiction series put out books by Eileen Myles, Cookie Mueller, Ann Rower, David Rattray, and many others.

Subsequent to a general introduction to Semiotext(e), ‘Frech Theory’, and Chris Kraus we will read and discuss her novel I Love Dick. The seminar is a reading group. But also a working group, as we will be developing a diagram of all characters, references, and the mutiplicity of sources in the book.

Dates: First meeting on Wednesday, Oktober 5, 5 pm / Further dates: Saturday, November 5 and Sunday, November 6 as well as Saturday, December 10 and Sunday, December 11, from 12am–6pm
Venue: Classroom, first floor, Hohenstauffengasse 9, Abteilung Malerei Prof. Henning Bohl
 
Literature (selection):

Leslie Jamison, “This Female Consciousness: On Chris Kraus,” The New Yorker, April 9, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/this-female-consciousness-on-chris-kraus
 

Elizabeth Gumport, "Female Trouble“, in: n+1, Issue 13, Winter 2012, https://nplusonemag.com/issue-13/reviews/female-trouble/.

Chris Kraus, I Love Dick, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles 2006

Chris Kraus, Introduction to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005)
http://semiotexte.com/?p=681

Mira Mattar (ed.), You Must Make Your Own Death Public. A Collection of Texts and Media on the Work of Chris Kraus, Mute Books, London 2015
http://www.metamute.org/sites/www.metamute.org/files/You-Must-Make-Your-Death-Public-Chris-Kraus-9781906496647.pdf

Henry Schwarz and Anne Balsamo, “Under the Sign of Semiotext(e): The story according to Sylvère Lotringer and Chris Kraus,” in: Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Volume 37, Issue 3, 1996, p. 205–220