Prof Stanley Corngold (Princeton University) will give a lecture as part of the CASiLaC European Thought and Global Inspiration Cluster

7 Apr 2016

This event will take place at 5 p.m. on Thursday 14 April in the CACSSS Mary Ryan Seminar Room, ORB G27

Kafka and the Poetry of Risk Insurance

Kafka’s stories allude to his culture with a fullness that is astonishing when one considers their economy of form. This work of allusion, a sort of movement through the cultural vehicles or media of his time, conforms to several logics. One such logic—the logic of risk insurance--comes from Kafka’s daytime preoccupation with accident insurance. Between 1908 and 1922, Kafka, a Doctor of Laws, rose to a high-ranking position at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Royal Imperial Kingdom of Austria-Hungary in Prague. Though ensconced in a semi-opaque bureaucracy, Kafka struggled to enforce compulsory universal accident insurance in the areas of construction, toy and textile manufacture, farms, and automobiles. Images from his work world, such as mutilation by machine, the perils of excavating in quarries while drunk, and the disappearance of the personal accident, penetrate “In the Penal Colony,” The Trial, and “The Metamorphosis.” An illustrated lecture will explore these images as they relate to the logic of risk insurance in Kafka’s literary practice.

Stanley Corngold is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton. He has published widely on modern German writers and thinkers (e.g. Dilthey, Nietzsche, Musil, Kraus, Mann, Benjamin, Adorno, among others), but for the most part he has been translating and writing on the work of Franz Kafka. On his retirement in 2009, Corngold received the Howard T. Behrman Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton.