|
Stanley Corngold graduated from Columbia and Cornell Universities and has been professor of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton since 1981. He has published widely on modern German writers and thinkers (e.g., Dilthey, Nietzsche, Musil, Kraus, Mann, Benjamin, and Adorno, among others); but for the most part he has been studying and translating the work of Franz Kafka. This year he co-edited Franz Kafka: the Office Writings (Princeton University Press, 2009), a work consisting of translations of Kafka’s major briefs and journal articles on the topic of Workmen’s Accident Compensation Insurance and Veteran’s Rehabilitation—texts that bear a productive relation to Kafka’s stories and novels. He has also translated Kafka’s stories (his two editions of The Metamorphosis published with Bantam and Norton have sold two million copies), and he has completed a Norton Critical Edition of Kafka’s Selected Stories (2007), which includes his new translations of thirty of Kafka’s stories, along with notes, essays, and commentaries. His latest critical work on Kafka is Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka (Princeton University Press, 2004). Corngold is also the author of Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature (Stanford University Press, 1998); The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory (Columbia and Duke University Press, 1986, 1994); Borrowed Lives (a novel; State University of New York Press, 1991); Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form (Cornell University Press, 1988); The Commentators’ Despair: The Interpretation of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” (Associated Faculty Press, 1973). His recent work on German literature and philosophy, literary theory, and media studies includes essays on the discourse of bookkeeping in modernist fiction; cannibalism in Hegel and Schopenhauer; the Gnostic strain in Nietzsche and Kafka; “Kafka & Sex”; “Kafka and the Philosophy of Music”; “Kafkas Schreiben”; the tragic sense in W.G. Sebald; and Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” as seen through the lens of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. In press are “Musical Indirections in Kafka’s ‘Researches of a Dog’”; “Aphoristic Form in Nietzsche and Kafka”; “Nietzsche: Nihilism and neo-Gnosticism”; “Special Views on Kafka’s Cages”; and “On the Margins of Allegory in Doktor Faustus.” With Benno Wagner he is writing a book on Kafka’s literary and philosophical culture titled Scintillating Perspectives (due out at Northwestern University Press next year). On retiring from Princeton in June 2009 and assuming he is still among the quick, he will spend fall 2009 at King’s College, Cambridge, and fall 2010 at the American Academy in Berlin.
|