The Individual and the Community: Paradoxes of Responsibility in Kafka's Prose Fiction

The Duke Center for Jewish Studies is pleased to welcome Carolin Duttlinger, Professor of German Literature and Culture at University of Oxford, for a lecture entitled "The Individual and the Community: Paradoxes of Responsibility in Kafka's Prose Fiction."

Carolin Duttlinger works on German literature, thought and culture from the eighteenth century to the present, with a particular focus on interdisciplinary modernism and contemporary literature. She has published widely on topics such as the history of psychology, Weimar photography, literature, memory and trauma, and on literature and anthropology. Her latest monograph, Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture, was published with OUP in 2022. It explores the intertwined histories of attention and distraction from the Enlightenment to the present day, in literature and thought, photography and music, psychology and self-help literature. A particular interest of hers is on the Prague writer Franz Kafka. She has published four books on Kafka and is the Co-Director of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre. Since 2024, she is the Principal Investigator of the AHRC research project 'Kafka's Transformative Communities'. She is also a member of the Executive Board of the International Walter Benjamin Society and writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.