Kafka’s Dreams: A Fragile Legacy

Isolde Schiffermüller

In this free public lecture, Professor Isolde Schiffermüller will focus on Kafka’s dreams, more precisely the approximately sixty dream notes recorded in his diaries and letters. Far from being mere biographical documents these texts can be understood, in a broader sense, as a creative matrix and an imaginative reservoir for Kafka’s writing. Starting from the author’s experience of lucid dreaming, the talk explores the significance of these dream accounts, with the aim of shedding new light on Kafka’s literary prose and its dreamlike truth.

Isolde Schiffermüller is Full Professor of German Literature at the University of Verona. Her research focuses on Austrian literature, twentieth-century literature, and literary theory, with particular emphasis on authors such as Stifter, Rilke, Musil, and Kafka. She has published several monographs and is among the co-editors of the Salzburger Bachmann Edition. Her most recent book is Kafkas Träume oder “die Arbeit der langen Nacht” (2024).

This hybrid event has been organised by the AHRC-funded research project Kafka's Transformative Communities, based at the University of Oxford.