Franz Kafka’s role as a world author is inextricably linked to his reception and afterlife. His global legacy has been shaped by academic as well as general readers, and by creative practitioners working across different art forms and media. The centenary of Kafka’s death in 2024 offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to take stock of this living legacy while setting new research agendas for the future.
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New Kafkaesque Story Collection with Ali Smith, Elif Batuman, and more
A Cage Went in Search of a Bird, a book of 10 brand new stories inspired by Kafka’s work, is written by a list of major literary bestsellers and prize winners. These include Ali Smith, Joshua Cohen, Elif Batuman, Naomi Alderman, Tommy Orange, Helen Oyeyemi, Keith Ridgway, Yiyun Li, Leone Ross and Charlie Kaufman. The stories will be introduced by prize-winning critic Becca Rothfeld.
£1m AHRC Award to OKRC’s Kafka Project
The Arts & Humanities Research Council has awarded over one million pounds to our project entitled ‘Kafka’s Transformative Communities.’ It is a collaboration between Profs. Carolin Duttlinger (PI, Oxford), Katrin Kohl (Co-I, Oxford), Barry Murnane (Co-I, Oxford), and Lucia Ruprecht (Co-I, Free University Berlin).
Job Alert: Come Work With Us!
The Faculty of Medieval & Modern Languages at the University of Oxford is seeking to appoint a fixed-term, full-time postdoctoral research associate for three years, starting on 1 January 2024, as part of our AHRC-funded project Kafka’s Transformative Communities.
Cockroaches, the Secret Agents of Kafka in South Korea
Recently, the so-called ‘Cockroach test’ or ‘Cockroach question’ began trending in South Korea on social platforms such as Tiktok and Instagram. A person asks a family member: ‘One morning, you wake up and find that I’ve changed into a cockroach. What would you do?’ There are various answers to this:
Excerpt from Attention and Distraction
Recently, the OKRC’s Carolin Duttlinger published a new book called Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture with Oxford University Press. More information about the book can be found in our news section. What follows here is an exclusive excerpt from the chapter on Kafka. The basic pattern [of a single moment…
New Book: Attention and Distraction
The OKRC’s own Carolin Duttlinger has recently published a book called Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture with Oxford University Press. It is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study which explores the dynamic relation between attention and distraction from the Enlightenment to the present day. And it includes an entire chapter on Kafka:…
Interview
For the first issue of Tablecloth Magazine over at Goldsmiths, Oxford’s Professor Carolin Duttlinger and Dr Karolina Watroba were interviewed by Tania Arenas about Kafka’s unlikely appeal to ‘Gen Z’. Kafka is finding a new life on TikTok and Twitter with young, mostly female, fans. An excerpt from the interview: “Kafka was clearly a point…
Flora Klug, Gentleman Impersonator
By Niamh Devlin Niamh Devlin holds a first-class MA (joint honours) in Philosophy/Theology & Religious Studies from the University of Glasgow and spent part of the summer of 2022 on a UNIQ+ research internship working with the Oxford Kafka Research Centre. Kafka’s interest in the Yiddish Theatre in Prague is a familiar topic within Kafka…
Kafka, Reader of Kierkegaard
By Fabio Bartoli Fabio Bartoli recently published his monograph on Kafka and Kierkegaard, in Spanish, called Un mismo lado del mundo. La seducción donjuanesca y la decisión fáustica en Kierkegaard y Kafka (Santa Rosa de Cabal: Casa de Asterión, 2022). Here he discusses, in English, Kafka’s reading of Kierkegaard. The relationship between Kafka and Kierkegaard is still an…