Arthur Rose Talk: Living with Kafka’s Asbestos Factory: Sights, Sounds and Textures

In this talk, Arthur Rose will revisit earlier work on the reception of Franz Kafka’s part ownership of an asbestos factory to think again about the sights, sounds and textures that Kafka’s biography and works conjure up when writing about asbestos. Previously, Rosefocused on sight, as a trope that Alan Bennett and James Kelman use in their Kafka-inspired work to address those asbestos harms that Kafka himself could not have been aware of. Recent work, like Stefani Engelstein’s on tubercular soundscapes in “The Burrow”, demand we reevaluate this ocularcentrism; accordingly, Rose asks how we might return to accounts of Kafka’s asbestos factory, fictional and nonfictional, to ask how the sounds and textures he evokes might help us think about asbestos’s ongoing health injustices.

Arthur Rose is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Exeter and the author of Asbestos – The Last Modernist Object (2022).

This lecture will be delivered in hybrid format (in person at the Taylor Institution Library, Oxford and online via Microsoft Teams). Attendance is free. 

Book here to attend in person: Living with Kafka's Asbestos Factory: Sights, Sounds and Textures (In-person attendance) | University of Oxford

Book here to attend online: Living with Kafka's Asbestos Factory: Sights, Sounds and Textures (Online attendance) | University of Oxford