Professor Kudszus studied literature, philosophy, and psychology at the Universities of Zurich, Freiburg/Breisgau, and Munich. Ph.D. Berkeley 1968. Stanford faculty 1967, Berkeley faculty since 1968. Kudszus has held visiting and research professorships at various universities, and in a number of disciplines and interdisciplinary programs: Cornell University (Society for the Humanities); University of Tübingen (German Literature); University of Mainz (Research Professor at the Institute of Psychiatry); University of Frankfurt/Main (Sociology/Psychoanalysis); Latvian Academy of Culture, Riga (Cultural Semiotics).
Major awards received include a Guggenheim Fellowship (Franz Kafka), a Merton research professorship (linguistics of schizophrenia), a Cornell University/Society for the Humanities research fellowship, and most recently a France-Berkeley Fund grant (project: “Metaphor in the Political Debate of Austerity Programs”). At the University of California, Berkeley, Kudszus has directed thirty-nine Ph.D. dissertations.
Kudszus’ research interests include language philosophy, relationships between science and literature, translation theory & practice, ecosemiotics, and the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Regarding the latter, his research and writing also draws on his professional experience in his psychodynamically oriented private practice (M.A., Clinical Psychology, 1996). Among Kudszus’ eight books are Poetic Process (1995), Terrors of Childhood in Grimms’ Fairy Tales (2005), Literatur und Schizophrenie: Theorie und Interpretation eines Grenzgebiets (ed., re-issued de Gruyter, 2011), and most recently the bi-lingual book Métaphores de l’austérité et austérité des métaphores/Metaphors of Austerity & the Austerity of Metaphors (co-ed., Paris: L’Harmattan 2018). Kudszus has also published some seventy articles (involving the writings of Novalis, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Freud, Rilke, Trakl, Kafka, R. Walser, T. Mann, Bobrowski, Celan, J. v. Uexküll, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, etc.). Kudszus’ current research focuses on linguistic and conceptual emergences (time, space, perception), with regard to salient writings (by Freud, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Uexküll, among others) in their interrelationships across various fields (psychoanalysis, literature, philosophy, history of science, ecosemiotics).
Ecosemiotics; Translation Studies; Language Philosophy (Hamann, Nietzsche, Mauthner, Wittgenstein, Heidegger); Psychoanalysis & Literature; 18th-21st Century Germanophone Poetry & Prose; 19th Century Science & Literature.
