By Haneul Lee 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: – ‘I…
Category: Blog
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…
Only Fools and Horses
by Meindert Peters Franz Kafka loved movies. He went to the movies often and wrote about them to friends and in his diaries. From these sources, Hanns Zischler has constructed a Kafka film library: a list of movies that Kafka must have seen. Zischler’s research was turned into a book and later a DVD collection,…
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…
Kafka and ‘Authentic Judaism’
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, a German-speaking assimilated Jew, living in turn-of-the century Prague, had a complex relationship…
On a 1983 Kafka Exhibition in Oxford
By Carolin Duttlinger Kafka has played a central role in the cultural life of Oxford for several decades. One important milestone was the centenary of Kafka’s birth in 1983, which the Bodleian Library marked with an exhibition dedicated to him. The richly illustrated catalogue describes an exhibition of two parts and with a dual focus.[1]…