Who’s Peaked? Chris Kraus’s Writing Performances as a Case Study for Twenty-First Century Writing Culture

Abstract

: In recent years, the work of Chris Kraus has crossed over from an avant-garde art circuit into mainstream literature. The self-reflexive stance and the strategies that she deploys to relate her own story to a broader intellectual and political context are reminiscent of certain tendencies in the Anglo-Saxon field of creative writing, but they mark her work first and foremost as an artistic research and performance. Kraus at the same time performs writing as an ongoing practice while revealing the writer as a simulacrum. In so doing, she formulates a strong critique of the male-dominated, capitalist worlds of art and theory at the end of the 20th century but also offers a model for an alternative female subjectivity that is complex, fragmented, and fascinating.