Call for Submissions

Topic: The Kafka Factor in Post-Holocaust Literature and Film

500-word abstracts are invited. All aspects, literatures, genres, ethnicities and countries will be considered. Proposals should be sent by March 15, 2012 to mlcaputomayr@hotmail.com and dcglorenz@gmail.com.

Modern Language Association 2012

THE KAFKA SOCIETY CONVENTION PROGRAM
Seattle, WA; January 2012

Saturday, 07 January 2012
8:30–9:45 am, Jefferson A and B, Sheraton
(Sheraton Seattle, 1400 6th Ave.)
Kafka and the Holocaust
A Special Session
Presiding: Marie Luise Caputo-Mayr, Temple University, Philadelphia

Speakers
Kathi Diamant, San Diego State University
Jeffrey A. Grossman, University of Virginia
Alexander Erik Larsen, University of Notre Dame
Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, University of Illinois, Chicago
Joseph W. Moser, Randolph Macon College
Eva B. Revesz, Denison University
Saskia Ziolkowski, University of California, Berkeley

This roundtable will address historio-biographic issues, including the confiscated papers from D. Diamant’s home and Primo Levi’s Trial translation, as well as Kafka’s literary legacy: Aichinger’s Jewish identity crisis, Schindel’s Born-Where, and countermyths to European enlightenment.

Click here to see images from last year’s convention!

Abstracts of the KSA Roundtable Presentations

Modern Language Association 2012, Seattle

Kathi Diamant

Report on the results of the Kafka Project/SDSU research efforts in Berlin, Germany, June–Sept 1998 and Eastern Europe in June–July 2008 and future plans for Poland in 2012–13.

The Kafka Project is an independent international investigation into the lost work (35 letters and 20 notebooks) written by Franz Kafka in the last year of his life and confiscated from his last love Dora Diamant by the Gestapo in Berlin, 1933. Building on the search begun in the 1950s by Max Brod and Klaus Wagenbach, the presentation will reveal the significant discoveries and plans for the continuing search in Eastern Europe.

Jeffrey Grossman

Franz Kafka: Prophet of the Holocaust or Avant-Garde Writer with a View to Politics?

The suggestion that Kafka had “premonitions of impending disaster” and should be read in relation to the Holocaust seems to re-introduce through the back door the image of Kafka as “prophet of the Holocaust.” Though seductive, this paper will argue against such a view. Rather, it argues, Kafka responded to both bureaucracy, even in its potentially violent forms, and to the political situation of Jews in Europe, but that these responses do not amount to “prophecy”—of the Holocaust or otherwise—not least since the Holocaust was unforeseen even by its perpetrators until they began to actually implement it.

Alexander Erik Larsen

Emerging Machines: “In der Strafkolonie” and Kafka’s “Distressing” Times

While commenting on the brutality depicted in his “In der Strafkolonie,” Kafka suggested that, “distress is not peculiar to this story alone…our times in general and my own time have been distressing as well and continue to be so…” This paper will explore such “distress” through the execution machine, which stands as a chilling portent of the union of perverse ideologies and modern machinery expressed most intensely by the Holocaust.

Dagmar Lorenz

Kafka: the Touchstone of Aichinger’s Jewishness

Aichinger has been discussed as a Kafka adept, a notion she rejected in “Die Zumutung des Atmens.” Rather, she suggests that she avoided Kafka out of apprehension of what she might find in his writings. As already her novel reveals, her ambivalence involves identity issues she faced as the racially persecuted Catholic granddaughter of a Jewish grandmother, a Holocaust victim, and as the wife of a German author and war veteran. Kafka, the author and the person, represent for Aichinger the touchstone of her Jewishness. He attracted and at the same time deterred her.

Joseph Moser

The Kafkaesque in Robert Schindel’s Novel Gebürtig

Robert Schindel’s 1992 novel Gebürtig is a great example of Kafka’s post-Shoah legacy, as this book shows Hermann Gebirtig, a Holocaust survivor and Viennese Jew returning from New York to Vienna, where he is to testify in a trial against Egger, a cruel guard of the KZ Ebensee. Gebirtig encounters numerous obstacles in Vienna and with the Austrian justice system, which works against him, in part reminiscent of Kafka’s Trial. There is a deep sense of distrust and paranoia as a result of the trauma of genocide, both on the part of the second generation of Holocaust survivors and non-Jewish Austrians.

Eva Revesz

Kafka’s Jewish Self-Hatred

My paper deals with the intersection of two varying though related strands of Kafka scholarship: first, Kafka’s own self-image as a Jew, specifically as a self-hating Jew, and second, his status as a prophet of the Holocaust. An inquiry into the reasons why Kafka’s reputation as a Holocaust prophet has all but dissolved fuels my paper. Why, I ask, has Kafka’s one-time status as a visionary of the Holocaust been repressed from more current scholarship? And why has this reading of Kafka been displaced by his supposed Jewish self-hatred in more recent criticism?

Saskia Ziolkowski

From Kafka to Primo Levi: Jewish Kafka in Italy

Using Primo Levi’s comments on his translation process of The Trial as a starting point, this paper investigates Kafka’s role as “Jewish author” in Italy. Levi commented on the similarities between the world depicted by Kafka and his own experiences as one reason why the editors linked him and the German-language author: this paper explores how Kafka influenced other authors who considered him an emblematic Jewish author before and after the Shoah (Natalia Ginzburg, for instance, cites Kafka as the only Jewish bourgeois author she knew of growing up), as well as offering a treatment of one aspect of the under-examined relations between Kafka and the Italian literary landscape.

Top picture: Audience and panelists at Kafka Roundtable 2011; Second row: Picture to the left: Panelists Janko Ferk, Chris Kone, Valerie Reed and Keith Leslie Johnston; Picture in the middle: Austrian guest speaker Janko Ferk and Maria Luise Caputo-Mayr, Director of the Kafka Society. (photos by Sandra Agnoli)

THE KAFKA SOCIETY CONVENTION PROGRAM
Los Angeles, CA; January 2011

Sunday, 09 January 2011
8:30–9:45 am, 301B, LA Convention Center
Interpreting Lives in Kafka’s Short Stories
A Special Session
Presiding: Marie Luise Caputo-Mayr, Temple University, Philadelphia

Speakers
Peter Beicken, University of Maryland, College Park
Janko Ferk, Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt*
Keith Leslie Johnson, Augusta State University
Christophe Koné, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Valerie Reed, University of Nevada, Reno

Kafka’s works at one level present and represent narrated lives at a crucial cultural and historical crossroads of Western civilization a hundred years ago. Eschewing realistic hard data, his works capture essential problems of his (and our) time, perceiving it as harboring evil. Selected prose pieces (“The Metamorphosis,” “The Judgement,” “Jackals and Arabs,” “Report to an Academy,” “The Burrow” and “The New Advocate/Dr. Bucephalus”) show how these mini-biographies and mini-autobiographies illuminate general life circumstances, exploring recent theory and adding a somewhat new perspective to the larger issue of narrating lives. Kafka’s recently published life documents (his office prose) and Stach’s new biography add background to these approaches, connecting his work and the fictional lives he created. New legal connections will be illustrated by Janko Ferk’s research.

* Janko Ferk’s appearance was sponsored by the City of Klagenfurt, Austria

Modern Language Association 2009

Modern Language Association 2008

Kafka Society of America Prize for Emerging Scholars

Among the many valuable scholarly submissions for the best essay prize, the Committee selected two outstanding essays and split the prize money of USD $2,000.00 between the two authors:

Keith Leslie Johnson, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT
Kafka: Toward an Ethic of the Creaturely

Sorin Radu Cucu, SUNY, Buffalo, NY
The Fantasy of the Invisible Master or the “Unnamable” in Kafka’s The Trial

The prize was sponsored by Franz Muster, Panoramic Windows and Doors, with the assistance of Dr. Brigitta Blaha, Austrian Consul General in New York City and members of the Executive Committee of the Kafka Society of America*. The winning essay was selected by a panel of experts.

*Kafka Executive Committee Sponsors: Stanley Corngold, Rolf J. Goebel, Clayton Koelb, Elizabeth Rajeck, Judith Ryan, Henry S. Sussman, Ruth V. Gross.

Kafka Society Members and Other Private Sponsors: Jennifer Geddes, Michael G. Levine, Breon Mitchell, Mark Harman, John Pizer, John Zilcosky, Marjorie Rhine.

We congratulate the winners and wish them a successful further career and thank again the sponsors of this prize.

Modern Language Association 2007

Modern Language Association 2006

Modern Language Association 2005

Modern Language Association 2004

Modern Language Association 2003

Papers can be submitted in either English or German. We would like to ask our contributing scholars to prepare and edit their papers with the utmost care to avoid the burden of prolonged editing. We ask for this professional courtesy in order to minimize, wherever possible, editorial work. Please, follow the most recent MLA style manual; “Endnotes” (Notes) and Works Cited are required. Also, consult recent numbers of the PMLA or our Journal. We ask you in particular to double-check all endnotes, quotations and citations for accuracy. We also urge you to make use of collegial editorial help, which always proves invaluable.

Submit your article via email attachment to the editors mentioned below and make sure to include your complete work and home addresses, phone, fax and email information. Your documents should be Microsoft Word 97-compatible. In addition, print out two hard copies of your document, checking that both correspond.

Your finalized papers should go by electronic submission to Maria Luise Caputo-Mayr, mlcaputomayr@hotmail.com (160 East 65th Str., 2 C, New York, NY 10065), Julius M. Herz aph1@lehigh.edu (3795 Route 212, Riegelsville, PA 18077) and Dagmar Lorenz dcglorenz@gmail.com, with hard copies to the addresses in parentheses.