“Death Writes: Kafka’s Body, Tubercular Soundscapes, and the Place of Art”

14 June 2022│Tuesday | 18:00 c.t.| Online Event

Stefani Engelstein is Professor of German Studies and of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her work focuses on literature and science, aesthetics, gender, and political theory. She is the author of Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2017) and Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse (SUNY Press, 2008), and co-editor of Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture (Rodopi Press, 2011) She is currently working on two book projects as a Visiting Scholar at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin, The Making of the Opposite Sex and Reflections from Germany on Diversity and Violent Pasts: An Essay in Six Cemeteries.

In dialogue with medical humanities and sound studies, this talk reads Kafka’s penultimate story, “Der Bau” as a reflection on the relationship of the author’s body and chronology to a fictional text.  The story becomes a Möbius strip in which the encounter of incommensurate worlds elicits transformation.  The animal narrator survives Kafka, who will die of tuberculosis half a year after composing the story, but it remains haunted by the exteriorized symptoms of Kafka’s illness. Kafka will therefore also survive indefinitely as a disruptive figment within the imagination of his own fictional character.

Franz Kafka, Der Bau: https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/kafka/bau/bau.html

Prof. Dr. Stefani Engelstein’s Websites:
https://scholars.duke.edu/person/stefani.engelstein
https://www.zfl-berlin.org/person/engelstein.html

About the Lecture Series:
The Falsafa-Colloquium is an international, interdisciplinary series of lectures which is organized by Professor Dr. Milad Karimi and Dr. Maryam Palizban. Renowned scholars are invited to the events in order to present and discuss results from their recent research.

The Colloquium will be presented digital.

Please register at the following address to receive the zoom-link:
a_jusu01@uni-muenster.de (Ariana Jusufi)