@article{gross_2023, title={Franz Kafka: "The Hunger Artist" Cycle and the small Prose of 1920-1924: Freedom-Judaism-Art}, volume={56}, ISSN={["2327-1809"]}, DOI={10.1353/oas.2023.0032}, abstractNote={Reviewed by: Franz Kafka: "Der Hungerkünstler"-Zyklus und die kleine Prosa von 1920–1924: Freiheit-Judentum-Kunst by Marcel Krings Ruth V. Gross Marcel Krings, Franz Kafka: "Der Hungerkünstler"-Zyklus und die kleine Prosa von 1920–1924: Freiheit-Judentum-Kunst. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2022. 497 pp. Taking up the same idea as in his earlier book Franz Kafka: Der "Landarzt"-Zyklus: Freiheit-Schrift-Judentum (2017) of reading various texts written within a specific time period as a unit, Marcel Krings focuses in this volume on Kafka's late writings, starting with the "Er" aphorisms from 1920 and progressing through his last period of creativity before his death in 1924. The amount of research and innovative thought that has gone into this volume is breathtaking. Krings is an excellent scholar, and his extensive readings provide the basis for his overarching perspective of Kafka's oeuvre as circling around two main themes—freedom and Judaism. His approach is, however, both the strength and the weakness of this volume. I will explain my ambivalence below. In his first chapter, Krings lays out his thesis: to read Kafka's individual texts without the context of the larger oeuvre, in Krings's opinion, is to miss that Kafka's works have an underlying unity—that it is incorrect to think of his works as open-ended. Krings believes that the theme of death that was already prevalent in the earlier Landarzt volume takes on far greater intensity in Kafka's later work. The idea of wanting to leave this world behind clearly permeates the late stories like "Investigations of a Dog," "Josephine," and "The Hunger Artist." Furthermore, Krings sees Kafka's literary project as messianic, since his interest is in a new Judaism that reveals the decline of true religion as practiced by the assimilated Jews, whom he imagines, for example, as dogs or mice. Kafka's new Judaism does away with concrete images and obscures the referent. Therefore, so much of the late writing is in the form of parable whose point is to critique any kind of earthbound religion. [End Page 116] The rest of Krings's book presents close readings of the late texts, including the "Er" aphorisms, a collection of various pieces called Das Konvolut 1920, Das "Hungerkünstler"-Heft, and finally, Der "Hungerkünstler"-Zyklus, to support his thesis of a unified thematic. Each successive reading alludes to other scholarly interpretations of the work but then settles in to explain the particular text in light of the two main themes Krings understands to be omnipresent in Kafka's works. He dismisses any kind of biographical or philological approach as missing Kafka's true meaning. As an example, I would like to focus on his reading of "Ein Kommentar (Gib's Auf)": a short text that I personally always begin with when I teach Kafka to students. Because the text is short and easily understood at the literal level, it is ideal for presenting to students the open-ended, multidirectional Kafka that makes his works so fascinating, puzzling, and ultimately enjoyable to read and re-read. Krings is, of course, familiar with the reading so brilliantly laid out and explained by Heinz Politzer in his seminal work from 1962 on Kafka and paradox, but Krings contends that Politzer's reading of this text as a paradox is untenable, if not totally misleading. According to Krings, readers should instead be asking themselves about "Kafkas Diagnose über den Zustand des zeitgenössischen Judentums" (336). To my mind, this is not an obvious query that occurs to the reader when confronted with Kafka's short text. Over the years, it has been read many ways, and it is often interesting to compare readings, but Krings's view suggests there can be no correct reading other than his own. This is a position I, as a Kafka scholar, find very troubling. That is not to say that Krings's reading is wrong—it is viable and it fits well into his overall discussion. But to me, it is simply another way of reading the text—to Krings, it seems, it would be the only way. That is what makes this volume so...}, number={2}, journal={JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN STUDIES}, author={Gross, Ruth V.}, year={2023}, pages={116–117} }
 @article{gross_2019, title={Read Kafka: The Approach of his Literature}, volume={52}, ISSN={["2327-1809"]}, DOI={10.1353/oas.2019.0023}, abstractNote={Reviewed by: Kafka lesen: Zur Methode seiner Literatur by Peter Pfaff Ruth V. Gross Peter Pfaff, Kafka lesen: Zur Methode seiner Literatur. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018. 213 pp. Peter Pfaff’s Kafka lesen: Zur Methode seiner Literatur is a tour-de-force reading of an entire oeuvre. In an unusual addition to the volumes of Kafka scholarship, this imaginative and sometimes frustrating work of Kafka criticism is reminiscent of Kafka criticism of the 1960s; I am thinking here particularly [End Page 163] of Kurt Weinberg’s Kafkas Dichtungen: Die Travestien des Mythos (1963). Like Weinberg before him, Pfaff maintains that there is only one essential subject that runs through each of Kafka’s texts and is thus a thread through all of Kafka’s writing—Kafka’s struggle with Jewish law and his own place within that law. For Pfaff, Kafka’s individual texts are unintelligible until they become steps on the path of the whole. Pfaff starts from the premise that Kafka remains an enigma after all these years and cites some critics (G. Neumann, Derrida, G. Kurz, et al.) who have discussed the paradoxes and incomprehensibility of various Kafka texts. The present book is Pfaff’s attempt to illustrate the “red thread” that goes through all of Kafka’s literature. For him, Kafka’s works are really only one continuous text, a self-determining text that Kafka proceeded to expand and modify, but of which he never lost sight. In “Der kleine Ruinenbewohner,” an oft-cited text from 1905 that Kafka wrote and rewrote in his diary (one version was published), the speaker laments his upbringing and education. Kafka postulates a self and muses about free will. The point for Pfaff is that although the speaker does not like the person he has become, he also has no intention of “doing away” with himself. Although he feels inadequate, the speaker still affirms living. The meaning of free will includes choosing how one dies—Freitod. Kafka often conceived of choosing death, but he never wanted it for himself. Pfaff believes that the will to die is theoretically necessary for Kafka but practically impossible in his writings. Kafka did not want to be free by killing himself—he wanted to be free through writing. In Pfaff’s view, the “Ruinenbesucher” sets the tone for all of Kafka’s other protagonists: like Kafka, their creator, they are figures who cannot act according to the manner in which they think they should. Pfaff sees the early period as a precursor to the Kafka of the 1911–12 breakthrough in which his self-determination takes on the problem of his relationship to his Jewishness, of his being part of something bigger. “Das judaistische Sujet machte Kafkas literarisches Glück. Bisher war er nur sich selbst Gegenstand gewesen, nun handelte er außerdem von der Tradition seines Volkes und seinem persönlichen Verhältnis zur Judenheit” (59). From here on, the subject of Kafka’s works, according to Pfaff, is the “forgotten” Judaism of the protagonists (Karl Rossmann, Georg Bendemann, Gregor Samsa, Josef K.). They are all prodigal sons of sorts, and they resist their inner Jewishness and self-destruct accordingly. Albeit with great variety, Kafka tells the same story in each of his creations—at least in Pfaff’s reading. The main [End Page 164] recurrent thread in all of Kafka is that the protagonist is plagued by something that rises inside him from the depths and haunts him psychologically to create his undoing—namely, his forgotten Judaism. Pfaff is obviously a learned Kafka scholar who has copious knowledge of the man and works and great familiarity with the vast critical body surrounding them. But, without going into great detail in this necessarily brief review, let me say that I question the premises of his kind of literary criticism. Every symbol, every character, every venue, and every name—broken down into a numerological decoding—is for Pfaff to be read as a Jewish clue; e.g., Georg Bendemann’s Sunday is actually Yom Kippur; Georg, an assimilated Jew, wants to marry a Christian woman and that is one of the reasons his father condemns him; Josef K.’s first interrogation is done...}, number={1-2}, journal={JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN STUDIES}, author={Gross, Ruth V.}, year={2019}, pages={163–165} }
 @article{gross_2018, title={Kafka: The Early Years}, volume={51}, ISSN={["2327-1809"]}, DOI={10.1353/oas.2018.0065}, abstractNote={His work almost completely disappeared from the cultural landscape of China. Beginning in the 1980s, a new generation of Chinese Germanists began to rediscover Schnitzler and to translate his works anew. Th is collection, in addition to the wideranging contributions on the “fate” of Schnitzler’s literary productions, places the weight of its overall focus on parts of his oeuvre not commonly known to nonspecialists, allowing the reader to discover a more complete Arthur Schnitzler. Raymond L. Burt University of North Carolina Wilmington}, number={4}, journal={JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN STUDIES}, author={Gross, Ruth V.}, year={2018}, pages={93–95} }
 @article{gross_2017, title={Hermann Leopoldi: Vienna’s “<i>Großer Bernhardiner</i>”}, volume={40}, ISSN={0343-1657}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.3726/lfl032017k_233}, DOI={10.3726/lfl032017k_233}, abstractNote={The date was October 10, 1942. The 2,500 seats in Orchestra Hall in Chicago were sold out with mostly German-speaking concertgoers, both longtime residents and more recently arrived immigrants (or refugees, as they were called at the time). The event was a concert by Hermann Leopoldi,
 “Vienna’s most popular entertainer” as the playbill touted1. With him was his relatively new partner, Helen (Helly) Moeslein. The next day the reviewer for the Chicago Tribune wrote the following:}, number={3}, journal={Literatur für Leser}, publisher={Peter Lang, International Academic Publishers}, author={Gross, Ruth V.}, year={2017}, month={Jan}, pages={233–242} }
 @inbook{gross_2016, place={Buenos Aires}, title={Figuralismo cotidiano y confusion narrative, estilo Kafka}, booktitle={Hayden White: cuarenta años de Metahistoria}, publisher={Prometeo Libros}, author={Gross, R.V.}, editor={Tozzi, Veronica and Bentivoglio, JulioEditors}, year={2016} }
 @article{gross_2016, title={Stefan Zweig and World Literature: Twenty-First Century Perspectives.}, volume={49}, ISSN={["2327-1809"]}, DOI={10.1353/oas.2016.0045}, abstractNote={Reviewed by: Stefan Zweig and World Literature: Twenty-First Century Perspectives ed. by Birger Vanwesenbeeck and Mark H. Gelber Ruth V. Gross Birger Vanwesenbeeck and Mark H. Gelber, eds., Stefan Zweig and World Literature: Twenty-First Century Perspectives. Rochester: Camden House, 2014. 266 pp. Was Stefan Zweig a first-class second-rate author or a modern master? This question haunts Stefan Zweig studies, which are currently experiencing a kind of renaissance. With the success of Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel, for which the filmmaker says he got his inspiration and even “stole” from Zweig’s stories, and the recent almost-bestseller The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World by George Prochnik (2014), Zweig’s works have once again found an audience. To be sure, Zweig, one of the most widely read and translated European authors of the first half of the twentieth century, has had minor resurgences before, but the aim of the editors of the book under review is to situate Zweig’s oeuvre firmly in the category of “world literature” as we define it in the twenty-first century, thus providing the often underrated author an honored place in literary studies. And yet, as we are told in the book’s introduction, this is the first book-length study of Zweig and his works in over twenty-five years. Occasional reviews and essays on his work, an example of which is Michael Hofmann’s “Vermicular Dither” in the London Review of Books in 2010, have often been critical of Zweig. What is it about the Viennese, Jewish Zweig, who went into exile when the Nazis came to power—first to England, then to the United States, and finally to Brazil—that so often causes readers to become apoplectic and harshly criticize both the author and their own enjoyment of his works? Other authors with a similar profile have not been subject to the same scorn that Zweig continues to engender. The current volume, with contributions by the two coeditors, and, among others, Klaus Weissenberger, Jeffery Berlin, Klemens Renoldner, and Robert Weldon Whalen, tries to provide some answers. The contributors hope to counter the recurring negative responses to [End Page 152] Zweig and his work, some of which have arisen because of his failure to speak out unequivocally during the days of his exile from Germany and before his suicide in 1942. Divided into four parts, the book contains twelve essays, some of which are expanded papers that were given at an international Zweig conference held in 2009; others were specifically written for the volume. All try to approach Zweig and his works through the broader perspective of world literature. The single essay that comprises Part I is coeditor Vanwesenbeeck’s discussion of “A Stefan Zweig Revival” and deals with the negativity in Zweig criticism but also with some recent projects concerning the author that globalize his work and could serve to create a transnational context for it in future discussions. The Zweig under consideration is not the nostalgic European who was so popular in the 1920s and 1930s but rather a writer interested in translation and intercultural exchange. According to the current categorical definition proffered by David Damrosch, true world literature is a literature of exile never completely anchored in its nationalistic ground. Vanwesenbeeck argues that through new lenses, Zweig goes beyond his linguistic and cultural points of origin and appropriately fits into this category. The case of placing Zweig in a broader context is well made and raises the issue of his not fitting the mold of other expatriate modernist writers who felt that their continuing writing was one way to understand and explain the exile experience. Because Zweig did not use his exile experiences in his work in the same way as they did, and ultimately because he committed suicide rather than continue an exile’s existence, critics like Klaus Mann, Hannah Arendt, and more recently Michael Hofmann have questioned his modernist credentials. Vanwesenbeeck’s contribution, as well as several others in the volume, reexamines and redefines the question. Marc Gelber, in his essay on “Stefan Zweig and the Concept of World Literature,” considers possible reasons for Zweig’s...}, number={1-2}, journal={JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN STUDIES}, author={Gross, Ruth V.}, year={2016}, pages={152-+} }
 @article{gross_2014, title={Everyday Figuralism and Narrative confusion, Kafka Style}, volume={65}, number={1}, journal={Storia della Storiografia, International Review}, author={Gross, R.V.}, year={2014}, pages={163–170} }
 @inbook{gross_2012, place={Rochester}, title={Anything You Want: Kafka and Women, Again}, booktitle={Literary Studies and the Pursuits of Reading}, publisher={Camden House}, author={Gross, R.V.}, editor={Downing, Eric and Hess, Jonathan M. and Benson, Richard V.Editors}, year={2012}, pages={216–232} }
 @misc{gross_2012, title={Wagner and the erotic impulse}, volume={35}, number={3}, journal={German Studies Review}, author={Gross, R. V.}, year={2012}, pages={649–651} }
 @misc{corngold_gross_2011, title={Introduction}, ISBN={9781571137586}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781571137586.002}, DOI={10.1017/9781571137586.002}, abstractNote={FRANZ KAFKA WAS BORN on July 3, 1883, into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Czech Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He died at the age of forty-one with the dubious luck of one who died too soon to experience the Nazi terror. His favorite sister, Ottla; his second fiancée, Julie Wohryzek; and his lover, Milena Jesenská, a brilliant Czech writer, were all murdered in concentration camps. Kafka never married — though he fell in love easily, and was easily loved — despite having been engaged three times, twice to the same woman, Felice Bauer. Felice survived the terror and left an extraordinary, voluminous collection of Kafka’s letters, which are testimony to her courtship by one of the century’s strangest cavaliers, as eloquent in his charm as he was insistent on his unsuitability. Kafka broke off his second engagement to Felice after he had contracted tuberculosis, which in the end consumed his larynx and caused him excruciating pain, so that he could barely speak and literally starved to death.}, journal={Kafka for the Twenty-First Century}, publisher={Boydell and Brewer Limited}, author={Corngold, Stanley and Gross, Ruth V.}, year={2011}, month={Oct}, pages={1–23} }
 @book{corngold s._gross_2011, title={Kafka for the Twenty-First Century}, ISBN={1571134824}, publisher={Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House}, author={Corngold S. and Gross, R. V.}, year={2011} }
 @inbook{gross_2011, place={Rochester}, title={Talk Dirty to Me: Probing Sexuality in Albert Drach’s Untersuchung an Mädeln}, booktitle={Contested Passions}, publisher={Camden House}, author={Gross, R.V.}, editor={Ruthner, Clemens and Whitinger, RaleighEditors}, year={2011}, pages={349–358} }
 @article{gross_2011, title={Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky}, volume={47}, ISSN={["0037-1939"]}, DOI={10.1353/smr.2011.0026}, abstractNote={Reviewed by: Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky Ruth V. Gross David J. Levin . Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky. U of Chicago P: Chicago, 2007. 254 pp. US$ 35 (cloth). ISBN-13: 978-0-226-477522-6. A night at the opera these days, especially in European houses, is not merely an amusing diversion. With the advance of what has come to be known as "Regieopera," even operas once considered "light-hearted romps" are now staged in ways that often force the audience to deal with interpretations that are, at best, provocative and, at worst, wrongheaded. David J. Levin, in his intelligent and challenging book, analyzes and describes some of the developments in opera productions of the last fifty years and boldly argues that for the survival of opera in the future, unsettling stagings are essential. Levin starts from the premise — one contrary to the norm — that opera in performance is itself an "unsettled" art form. By the very fact that when produced, it is a work on stage that touches on a number of different and competing modes of expression and artistic systems, opera is unruly. When opera performances have been the subjects of study, up until now, the questions raised have been mostly of a historical nature, for example: has the production observed performance practices? or what were the social conditions under which the operas were written or first performed? Only a handful of musicologists before Levin have concerned themselves with questions about how the nature of performance might change the understanding of the opera text itself, and these few have simply asked the question rather than providing a real exegesis on the subject. Levin's book begins a new field of inquiry: mapping the intersection of contemporary developments in opera production and contemporary critical concerns in opera studies. Levin, who for many years worked as a dramaturge at opera houses in Germany and the United States, provides the reader with examples of staged productions that, for the most part, radically reexamine and reconceptualize the underlying operatic texts in such a way that, in the best cases, they uncover new explanations of the works. This is the kind of "unsettling" experience Levin wishes for opera goers. Unlike many opera critics, Levin believes that radical and innovative readings of canonical operas, like the ones he discusses in chapters 2-5 of his book, are a promising development and bode well for the future of operatic art. The chapters of his book, as the subtitle suggests, deal with each of four important and familiar operas in the standard repertoire by four different major composers — Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Mozart's and Lorenzo Da Ponte's Le nozze di Figaro, Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and Verdi's Don Carlos; the last chapter [End Page 388] deals with a seldom performed opera by a lesser-known composer, Alexander von Zemlinsky's Der König Kandaules. Levin has chosen the specific productions he discusses on the basis of their being widely available on DVDs, so that the reader can also become a spectator of these performances and be unsettled by them firsthand. Because Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is my favourite opera, I was particularly curious about what Levin had to say about this work. Because what we might call "controversial" or more figurative stagings of this opera are not available on the commercial DVD market, Levin decided to compare the way each of two conventional and literal productions staged part of act III, the scene in which Wagner conceptualized a scene of performance — Beckmesser's delivery of the Meisterlied composed by Walther von Stolzing but drafted in Hans Sachs's hand. Levin's interest is in how this scene is then conceptualized in the two conventional productions. One of the directors has staged the scene to reveal the motivation for a gesture that Wagner himself had not explained in his text, and this touch is evidence for Levin that, even within conventionality, there can be streaks of wit and innovation that illuminate and explain what may previously have been invisible or overlooked. On a small scale, this is...}, number={3}, journal={SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES}, author={Gross, Ruth V.}, year={2011}, month={Jul}, pages={388–389} }
 @misc{gross_2009, title={Kafka and the Jewish-Zionist woman: Discussions of eroticism and sexuality in Prague Zionism}, volume={104}, journal={Modern Language Review}, author={Gross, R. V.}, year={2009}, pages={254–255} }
 @misc{gross_2008, title={Rudolfsheim-Krieau-Raimund theatre or the case of Franz Ruckauf sen}, volume={41}, number={1}, journal={Modern Austrian Literature}, author={Gross, R. V.}, year={2008}, pages={111–113} }
 @article{gross_2007, title={Finding the Right Key to Kafka’s Castle: André Laporte’s Opera Das Schloss}, journal={Journal of the Kafka Society of America}, author={Gross, R.V.}, year={2007} }
 @article{gross_2006, title={Lambent traces: Franz Kafka.}, volume={79}, number={1}, journal={German Quarterly}, author={Gross, R. V.}, year={2006}, pages={120–121} }
 @article{gross_2006, title={The  myth of power and the self: Essays on Franz Kafka.}, volume={79}, number={2}, journal={German Quarterly}, author={Gross, R. V.}, year={2006}, pages={280–281} }
 @book{gross_adam_2006, title={Traveling between worlds : German-American encounters}, ISBN={9781585444786}, publisher={College Station :  Texas A & M University Press}, author={Gross, R.V. and Adam, T.}, year={2006} }
 @book{gross_gray_goebel_koelb_2005, title={A Franz Kafka encyclopedia}, ISBN={0313303754}, publisher={Westport, Conn. :  Greenwood Press}, author={Gross, R. V. and Gray, R. T. and Goebel, R. F. and Koelb, C.}, year={2005} }
 @misc{gross_2002, title={Hunting Kafka Out of Season: Enigmatics in the Short Fictions}, ISBN={9781571136022}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781571136022.014}, DOI={10.1017/9781571136022.014}, abstractNote={IN THE PREFACE TO THE 1995 English edition of his 1990 philosophical work Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art, Mario Perniola asks the following questions about our own state at the end of the twentieth century:}, journal={A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka}, publisher={Boydell and Brewer Limited}, author={Gross, Ruth V.}, year={2002}, month={Apr}, pages={247–262} }
 @misc{gross_2002, title={Kafka’s short fiction}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ccol0521663148.006}, DOI={10.1017/ccol0521663148.006}, abstractNote={In a letter to Felice Bauer Kafka writes about the venue of his writing, explaining that his letter 'is no longer written from the office, for my office work defies my writing to you; that kind of work is completely foreign to me, and bears no relation to my real needs' (29.x.12; LF: 18). He refers in other letters to the 'particularly awful' and 'voracious world' (7.xii.12; LF: 96) of his office life, where his 'depressing office desk' (17/18.xii.12; LF: 109) 'is littered with a chaotic pile of papers and files; I may just know the things that lie on top, but lower down I suspect nothing but horrors' (3.xii.12; LF: 84). We know all too well from comments like these how troubling he found it to balance his 'day job' with his need to write the works for which he became famous.}, journal={The Cambridge Companion to Kafka}, publisher={Cambridge University Press}, author={Gross, Ruth V.}, year={2002}, month={Feb}, pages={80–94} }
 @inbook{gross_1995, place={New York}, title={Kafka and Women}, booktitle={Approaches to Teaching Kafka's Short Fiction}, publisher={MLA of America}, author={Gross, R.V.}, editor={Gray, RichardEditor}, year={1995}, pages={69–75} }
 @article{gross_1994, title={Peter Rosei, Case Pending, chapter 1}, volume={I}, number={1}, journal={Dimension2}, author={Gross, R.V.}, year={1994} }
 @inbook{gross_1992, place={Ann Arbor}, title={György Kurtág's Kafka Fragmente: Kafka in Pieces}, booktitle={Traditions of Experiment from the Enlightenment to the Present}, publisher={The University of Michigan Press}, author={Gross, R.V.}, editor={Kaiser, Nancy and Wellbury, DavidEditors}, year={1992}, pages={187–21} }
 @book{gross_1990, title={Critical essays on Franz Kafka}, ISBN={9780816188482}, publisher={Boston, Mass. : G.K. Hall}, author={Gross, R.V.}, year={1990} }
 @inbook{gross_1989, place={Detroit}, title={Stefan Zweig}, booktitle={Dictionary of Literary Biography: Modern Austrian Prose Fiction Writers}, publisher={Bruccoli Clark Layman}, author={Gross, R.V.}, year={1989}, pages={313–335} }
 @article{gross_1988, title={Laying Down the Law: Recent Books on Kafka}, volume={80}, url={https://dokumen.tips/documents/laying-down-the-law-recent-books-on-kafka.html}, number={4}, journal={Monatshefte}, author={Gross, R.V.}, year={1988}, pages={488–496} }
 @inbook{gross_1987, place={Bloomington}, title={The Paranoid Reader and his Neighbor: Subversion in the Kafkan Text}, booktitle={Franz Kafka: The Contemporary Critical Performance}, publisher={Indiana University Press}, author={Gross, R.V.}, editor={Udoff, AlanEditor}, year={1987}, pages={150–157} }
 @inbook{gross_1986, place={Waterloo, Ont}, title={Of Mice and Women: Reflections on a Discourse}, booktitle={Franz Kafka 1883-1983: His Craft and Thought}, publisher={Wilfred Laurier University Press}, author={Gross, R.V.}, editor={Struc, RomanEditor}, year={1986}, pages={117–140} }
 @article{gross_1985, title={Of Mice and Women: Reflections on a Discourse in Kafka's “Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse”}, volume={60}, ISSN={0016-8890 1930-6962}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00168890.1985.9934792}, DOI={10.1080/00168890.1985.9934792}, abstractNote={Le paradoxe et la parabole chez K. La femme exprime la reflexion sur le concept paradoxal de l'interiorite et le depassement de cette interiorite. Le cliche de "la femme et de la souris" dans cette nouvelle de K. comme le signe parabolique d'un repli pathologique sur le moi.}, number={2}, journal={The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory}, publisher={Informa UK Limited}, author={Gross, Ruth V.}, year={1985}, month={Apr}, pages={59–68} }
 @article{gross_1984, title={Austrian Literature and the Papageno Problem}, volume={17}, number={3/4}, journal={Modern Austrian Literature}, author={Gross, R.V.}, year={1984}, pages={29–40} }
 @article{gross_1983, title={Fallen Bridge, Fallen Woman, fallen Text}, volume={26}, journal={The Literary Review}, author={Gross, R.V.}, year={1983}, pages={577–587} }
 @article{gross_1983, title={Otto Basil: 1901-1983}, volume={16}, journal={Modern Austrian Literature}, author={Gross, R.V.}, year={1983}, month={Dec} }
 @book{gross_1982, title={Plan and the Austrian rebirth : portrait of a journal}, ISBN={0938100033}, publisher={Columbia, S.C. :  Camden House}, author={Gross, R.V.}, year={1982} }
 @article{gross_1981, title={Fallen Bridge, Fallen Woman, Fallen Text}, journal={Newsletter of the Kafka Society of America}, author={Gross, R.V.}, year={1981}, month={Jun}, pages={15–24} }
 @inbook{gross_1981, place={New York}, title={Ilse Aichinger}, booktitle={Ungar's Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century}, publisher={Ungar}, author={Gross, R.V.}, year={1981} }
 @article{gross_1981, title={Kaspar/Kasperl: Repetition and Difference in Handke and Drach}, volume={54}, ISSN={0016-8831}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/405349}, DOI={10.2307/405349}, abstractNote={"Kasperletheater" designates puppet theater in Austria and Southern Germany. It got its name from Kasperl, the Austrian version of the "Wurstel" or "Hans Wurst," the naive country bumpkin who with his charm, humor, and common sense, became the hero of Viennese comic theater as well as of a certain kind of marionette theater in the eighteenth century. At their inception, Kasperl plays brought a new dimension to the traditional Hanswurst clown figure-the diminutive -erl. As if to emphasize their petty and infantile qualities, the new comic figures, starting with Johann Laroche's Kasperl, remained diminutized for a long time thereafter, whether called Jackerl, Kratzerl, Lipperl, Kramperl, or Zwercherl.1 Because of his designated smallness, Kasperl allowed audiences to feel superior to him and therefore could never be considered as dangerous, no matter how aggressive or impudent he became. Kasperl plays, at that time, were comedies of physicality and action, in which the clown, like the English Punch, would typically beat another character or himself be beaten. In the course of the nineteenth century, however, Kasperl plays began to change from comedies of violent action to comedies of words and wit. In 1859 Franz von Pocci (1802-1876), the Bavarian artist, composer, and writer, published a collection of plays with Kasperl as the main character. Pocci wrote more than forty Kasperl comedies during his life. In them Kasperl Larifari assumes all sorts of professions and is "bekannt wie das schlechte Geld." Pocci's has been termed a comedy of "sprudelnden sprachlichen EinfAllen." Plays on words, linguistic reductions, malapropisms abound and recall the Viennese comic tradition of the Zauberposse, which reached its zenith with Raimund and later developed a social thrust with Nestroy, Pocci's contemporary. Mainly, however, the humor of Pocci's Kasperl lies in the literal application of figurative expression. For example, in the Kasperl play Konig Drosselbart, Kasperl recounts the following: "Wie ich anklopf, kommt eine Frau heraus, winkt mir hinein; sie red't kein Wort,}, number={2}, journal={The German Quarterly}, publisher={JSTOR}, author={Gross, Ruth V.}, year={1981}, month={Mar}, pages={154} }
 @article{gross_1980, title={Rich Text/Poor Text: A Kafkan Confusion}, volume={95}, ISSN={0030-8129 1938-1530}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/462013}, DOI={10.2307/462013}, abstractNote={Franz Kafka’s “Eine alltägliche Verwirrung” ‘An Everyday Confusion’ is a skeletal, or “poor,” text in that one code of reading—the referential—dominates it, while other codes present in a classic, or “rich,” text are almost absent. Using a method freely adapted from Roland Barthes’s S/Z, my article closely examines the referentiality of Kafka’s text, juxtaposing the proverbial (or common-language) response evoked by the text with the personal reactions of a single reader. Kafka’s theme, the inability of common, proverbial language to make real communication possible, is allegorized in the brief tale of A and B, whose comings and goings are mirrored, and at times interfered with, by the language in which these events occur.}, number={2}, journal={PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America}, publisher={Modern Language Association (MLA)}, author={Gross, Ruth V.}, year={1980}, month={Mar}, pages={168–182} }
 @article{gross_1979, title={The Narrator as Demon in Grass and Alain-Fournier}, volume={25}, journal={Modern Fiction Studies}, author={Gross, R.V.}, year={1979}, pages={625–639} }
 @article{gross_1979, title={The Poetics of Opposition: PLAN 1938}, volume={12}, journal={Modern Austrian Literature}, author={Gross, R.V.}, year={1979}, pages={22–40} }