Kafka's Enemies
NEMLA 2000
Buffalo NY -- April 2000
The panel is not "on" Kafka, but on Kafka's enemies - his opponents,
rivals, betrayers - all those who help define the obstructions Kafka faced
as a German Jewish male in the tumult of the central European fin-de-siecle.
Kafka's work has often been called upon to help clarify the experience of
persecution as well as the sense of self-loathing which appears a direct
consequent of the very conditions which erupted into the fascism,
nationalism, and anti-Semitism. This panel would occasion papers dealing
with Kafka's social, cultural and political location in the unstable
Austro-Hungarian Empire. The purpose of the panel is to seek illumination on
whether and how Franz Kafka resisted overt religious, political, social
commitments when his entire world appeared periodically shaken to its roots
by social turbulence.
Panelists might focus on several recent debates. These debates
include, for example, the place of modernism in public culture (such as
Lawrence Rainey's Institutions of Modernism) which could be usefully paired
with Kafka's supposed dandyism and aestheticism. Recent works by important
theorists of Jewish cultural studies, such as Daniel Boyarin's Unheroic
Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man,
and Sander Gilman's Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden
Language of the Jews are also pertinent. And as Kafka closely documented his
own sense of self-destruction, impotence and anger in his copious journals,
panelists are invited to consider Kafka's position as his own worst enemy.
Send abstracts or completed papers by Sept. 15 to:
Dr. Andrew Schmitz
D'Youville College
320 Porter Ave.
Buffalo, NY 14201
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