Patrick Greaney
Associate Professor of German

Patrick Greaney's research and teaching focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature in French and German.

His recent courses include “German Women Writers,” “Origins of the German Crime Novel,” “Foucault and Literature,” “The Modern German Novel (Musil, Kafka, Mann),” “Metropolis and Modernity,” and “The Theory of the Spectacle.”

He studied Comparative Literature at Yale and Johns Hopkins, and he has published articles on Hoelderlin, Nietzsche, Ungaretti, Fassbinder, Ilse Aichinger, and Urs Allemann. His book Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin (University of Minnesota Press) examines modern literary and philosophical texts about poverty in light of recent theories of power. His current research focuses on the use of montage and citation by French, Austrian, and Belgian writers and artists from the 1950s to the 1980s, especially the Vienna Group, Guy Debord, Marcel Broodthaers, and Heimrad Bäcker. His co-translation of Heimrad Bäcker’s transcript will be published by Dalkey Archive Press in winter 2010.