100 years of Kafka
Between June and August 1921, Franz Kafka wrote a letter to his friend Max Brod. He mentioned Jewish German literature and the Jewish identity among the younger generation of Jews living in Europe.
According to Kafka, most young Jewish writers at that time were trying, under their fathers’ ambiguous approval, to escape from their Judaism through writing in German. However, when they tried to step forward, they discovered they were “
still clinging to their fathers’ Judaism with their hind legs and found no new ground with their forelegs”.
This desperation was reflected in the paradoxical absurdity of Jewish German literature, as he described “
Primarily, the product of their despair could not be German literature, though outwardly it seemed to be so”. Kafka went so far as to call this pathetic “German literature that has failed to be German literature” a “
literature that is impossible in all respects”.
Kafka’s arguments in this letter became the starting point of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theory of minor literature.
2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Kafka. 2025 celebrates the 50th anniversary of the publication of Deleuze and Guattari’s “
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature”. This talk will look into Kafka’s concept and practice of minor literature through an introduction of his life, his creative background and writing style.
Guest Speaker:
Lik-kwan CHEUNG received his Ph.D. from the Division of Intercultural Studies, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He is an adjunct assistant professor at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, CUHK. He is also an examiner of Hong Kong Arts Development Council, and the academic editor of O-Square: Journal of Literature and Culture. He was a visiting scholar of Harvard-Yenching Institute (2009-2010). His book, Qu Qiu-bai and Transcultural Modernity was published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press (2020). He won the “Recommended Prize of Literary Criticism, the 16th Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature” (2022) for this book.
Back
