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…
Tag: Kafka
CfP: Kafkaesque in the Arts
In May 2024, the Archiv der Zeitgenossen in Krems (Austria) will host the conference “The Kafkaesque in the Arts”. The conference language is German. The Call for Papers can be found here: https://www.archivderzeitgenossen.at/das-archiv/news/detail/news/detail/News/call-for-papers-das-kafkaeske-in-den-kuensten/
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…
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…
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]…