ABSTRACT
Muschg has combined a writing career with a number of academic posts in Tokyo, Göttingen, Ithaca (New York), Geneva and Zurich. A cosmopolitan Swiss, Muschg concentrates in his fiction on the personal and professional predicaments of intellectuals which he views with detachment, psychological acuteness and remarkable linguistic virtuosity. Art as illusion and necessary compensation for maladjustment to reality is the theme of the Frankfurt literature lectures Literatur als Therapie? (1981), as of several works. These features bring Muschg closer to the Anglo-American mainstream of fiction than any other German-speaking writer except Martin Walser.
