Jake Van der Kolk defends Ph.D. dissertation on Austrian writer Hermann Broch

On August 16, 2017, Ph.D. candidate Jake Van der Kolk successfully defended his thesis, entitled “The Self-Destructing Text: Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil and the Limits of Avant-Garde Narrative.” The thesis examines how the notoriously difficult novel The Death of Virgil (1945) by Hermann Broch — written largely in the US where Broch was in exile during WWII — engages the reader in literary and existential self-inquiry, and in so doing demonstrates the impossibility of avant-garde narrative. Congratulations, Jake!