Professor David Kim
Wednesday, November 16, 2016, 12:00pm - 01:30pm

Title: "Kafkas private Offentlichkeit: Kritik einer politischen Imagination"

Why is it that Kafka's works repeatedly serve as inexhaustible fictional backdrops against which writers and scholars alike denounce basic human rights violations in modern society? From Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt to J.M. Coetzee and AytenGündoğdu, countless thinkers turn to Kafka for inspiration, as they criticize totalitarian regimes. The aim of this lecture is to explain this intellectual genealogy by taking a close look at the blurring of boundaries between private and public in Kafka's novel Der Prozess and other fictional and autobiographical texts. Scholars have long explained this negotiation as Kafka's writerly attempt to overcome personal struggles and redefine himself in the world. Instead of reiterating this claim, I demonstrate how an even more paradoxical phenomenon--that is, a private public--constitutes the core of Kafka's significance for political imagination in (post)modernity. Lecture in German, discussion in English.

Click here to view flyer or here for more information!

 

Location Academic Building, West Wing Room #4050
German Department Seminar Room