2025 Grimm Lecture - Kafka Around the World

Описание: When Kafka died in 1924 at the age of forty, he had published only a modest number of short stories and other small pieces. Yet even though his three novels had not yet appeared, and his published works were known only to a handful of Central European literati, the foundations of his worldwide fame were already laid.

A century later, Kafka endures as one of the most iconic voices – and faces – of modern literature. What is it about the life and literature of this unassuming Jewish man from Prague that has resonated with readers across cultures and generations? In search of an answer, this lecture will move from Weimar Berlin, where Kafka was a fixture in one of the most important cultural magazines of the 1920s, to the 2020s, when Han Kang, first introduced to English-language readers as ‘Korea’s Kafka’, became the country’s first recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Dr. Karolina Watroba is a scholar of German and Comparative Literature based at the University of Oxford and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. She works across several languages, including German, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, and Korean, and specialises in European modernism and its global reception and continuing relevance today. She is the author of Mann’s Magic Mountain: World Literature and Closer Reading (2022) and Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka (2024).