Cent anys després de la seva mort, Franz Kafka és un autor en transformació i un dels clàssics més enigmàtics de la modernitat. Malgrat el seu arrelament en allò quotidià i un llenguatge extraordinàriament clar i despullat d’ornaments, la seva obra —com se sol dir— continua essent difícil de comprendre. Els assajos reunits en aquest volum commemoratiu parteixen d’aquesta inaccessibilitat de l’obra kafkiana i l’assumeixen com una invitació a aportar nova llum, si és possible, sobre aspectes concrets de la producció de l’autor praguès, ja sigui assajant nous enfocaments poetològics, rellegint assajos crítics clàssics, reflexionant sobre la (im)possibilitat de traduir-lo, valorant les traduccions existents (al castellà i al català) o explorant models de recepció creativa. S’adrecen tant a un públic expert i acadèmic com al lector comú, tant als qui s’acosten per primera vegada —o per segona— a l’obra kafkiana com a tots aquells que continuen i hauran de continuar repetint-se la pregunta que, segons l’escriptor César Aira, sobrevola tota la seva obra: de què està parlant?

Modern authors are dependent on journalism. Since the eighteenth century, when book reviews became an integral part of the literary market, authors have relied on critics to endorse their books and bring them to the attention of a wider audience. But literary authors did not merely become the

Attention and distraction are anthropological constants, central to the way we experience the world; often cast as adversaries, they are in fact closely intertwined, and their relationship is not constant but highly changeable—a barometer of social and cultural change. This wide-ranging interdisciplinary study explores the interplay of attention and distraction from the Enlightenment to the present day, with a particular focus on twentieth-century Germany. Building on the Enlightenment tradition of mental self-observation, nineteenth-century Germany was the birthplace of experimental psychology which sought to measure and potentially enhance attention. Around 1900, this new, psychologically informed understanding of the self began to shape domains such as work and leisure, consumerism and education. In the Weimar Republic, the new discipline of psychotechnics was seen as central to the effort of building a modern, efficient, and potentially fairer society. Its aspirations were mirrored and enhanced by a thriving self-help literature market, which gave readers the tools for their own cognitive optimization. Yet as attention was cast as the key mental resource, in professions ranging from train drivers to telephone operators, distraction emerged as the new buzzword of the period, evoking the spectre of mental and social fragmentation. For many early twentieth-century commentators anxious about the pace of modern life, the rise of distraction spelled the end of contemplative attention. This book shows that many leading German writers, thinkers, and artists did not simply endorse this negative assessment of distraction, but engaged with the dialectical nature of attention constructively, by enacting and reflecting (on) the intrinsically fluid nature of the human mind.

Article Kata Gellen, Kafka and Noise. The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL 2019. 252 S., € 34,09. was published on December 1, 2022 in the journal Arbitrium (volume 40, issue 3).

Abstract Kafka first encountered the question of (in)attention while still at school, in psychology lessons which acquainted him with Herbart’s dynamic theory of the mind as the site of competing forces, and attention remains a besetting theme in his life and work. In his diaries and letters, Kafka bemoans his own wavering concentration, eroded by insomnia and the demands of work, family, and relationships, and yet in the reports he produced for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, the instability of attention is cast as a statistical constant, as the inevitable product of the modern working environment. A very different picture emerges in his fiction. His earlier protagonists are chronically distracted, and even minor instances of distraction bring about disastrous consequences. In his later texts, in contrast, Kafka turns to the downsides of attention, and texts such as ‘The Burrow’ (1923) explore the (self-)destructive nature of excessive vigilance.

Abstract The social imperative to improve one’s attention was not limited to the workplace but also invaded people’s private lives. Complementing the roll-out of psychotechnics, self-help guides promising their readers enhanced powers of concentration boomed in the interwar years. This chapter looks at three very different examples of this genre. While Reinhard Gerling offers a ten-week course of exercises designed to control body and mind, Karl Otto Schmidt recommends a programme of meditation inspired by autosuggestion and the spiritualist New Thought movement. Finally, Philipp Müh’s guide advocates a piece of innovative hardware, the ‘Konzentrator’, as the ultimate, cybernetic tool of cognitive self-enhancement. As the chapter concludes, Weimar self-help literature continues the tradition of Enlightenment hygiene literature with a modern, secular inflection. The ultimate goal is no longer moral self-improvement but heightened mental capacity as the ultimate tool in the modern struggle of all against all.

Abstract Around 1900, the findings of experimental psychology were echoed by cultural commentators. Historians, sociologists, and psychiatrists coalesced around the same core argument: that rapid social and technological modernization was eroding sustained concentration, overloading mind and senses and leading to individual suffering and societal decline. This chapter looks at the debate around neurasthenia as one of the most dramatic (yet puzzling) manifestations of this perceived crisis of attention, contrasting this debate with the writings of Sigmund Freud. Freud was very familiar with psychological theories of attention but deems them insufficient to explain phenomena such as trauma and parapraxis. In his own therapeutic practice, he employs an ‘evenly suspended attention’ to pick up on unexpected clues in his patients’ utterances; in his writings, he emphasizes the multi-shaded nature of human experience in everyday life and the role of distraction as a literary theme.

Abstract The ideal of contemplative listening emerged around 1800, in the context of the Romantic notion of Kunstreligion (art religion); this model was cemented and invested with a moral dimension in Eduard Hanslick’s treatise On the Musically Beautiful (1854), which emphasized the need to listen attentively rather than in a passive and ‘culinary’ fashion. In the early twentieth century the perceived gradual decline of sustained listening diagnosed by Hanslick turned into a full-blown crisis as new, popular and casual musical formats took hold in modern culture. However, responses to this shift were far from uniform. While some music critics and practitioners tried to restore contemplative listening in their audiences and bring classical music to new social groups, the musicologist and Heidegger pupil Heinrich Besseler pursued a different route. An advocate of Gebrauchsmusik, which breaks down the divide between performers and listeners, he turned to examples of embodied, only semi-attentive listening practices in the early modern period as a model for musical culture in the twentieth century.

Abstract Theodor W. Adorno was a vocal advocate of atonal music and one of the most outspoken critics of popular music and its culture of casual, non-contemplative listening. As this chapter shows, his uncompromising stance on the issue is rooted in the musical aesthetic of the nineteenth century, particularly the writings of Eduard Hanslick. Having explored his earlier essays on musical listening and popular music, the chapter then turns to Adorno’s American exile, when he encountered sociological methods of listener research at the Princeton Radio Research Project. Critical of American musical broadcasts, such as Walter Damrosch’s NBC Music Appreciation Hour, Adorno went on to present his own musical education broadcasts, which aimed to introduce young listeners to classical music, including new music, and encouraged sustained, ‘structural’ listening. Although the series was prematurely abandoned, he continued this mission on West German radio after his return from exile. The chapter concludes with Adorno’s post-war writings, particularly his more essays on method and style, where he defends his own, famously mode of writing as intrinsic to his critical project, while also underlining the pleasurable and playful nature of intellectual engagement.

Abstract Walter Benjamin’s lifelong engagement with the interplay between attention and distraction included not only photography but also film as well as literature, visual art, and history. Indeed, his work represents one of the most complex and sustained engagements with the dynamics of attention and distraction in the twentieth century. The chapter puts this engagement into a wider context, starting with the attentional research published in the psychology journal edited by William Stern, the inventor of psychotechnics, who was also Benjamin’s cousin by marriage. Benjamin encountered this research, which emphasizes the constructive role of distraction in enhancing mental focus, while still at university; it underpins his own writings on this complex subject, where Benjamin engages with the dialectical nature of attention, which can arise out of or give way to contrasting states. Another formative influence is the work of his sister Dora Benjamin, whose mental health exhibition, which opened in Berlin-Kreuzberg in 1929, used new, experimental techniques to bait visitors’ attention and prevent passive consumption. Benjamin’s exhibition review praises these innovative strategies; he returns to this issue in his writings on modern culture and technology, particularly in his essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935). Here, Benjamin rejects traditional contemplation and endorses distraction as the mindset most appropriate for the challenges of the modern age; the final part of the chapter, however, looks at his essays on literature and his historical writings, where contemplation is rehabilitated and discussed alongside Geistesgegenwart (presence of mind) as a vital tool of intellectual enquiry and critique.

Abstract In the early twentieth century, the methods of experimental psychology filtered through into everyday life. One response to the cognitive strains of modern life was ‘psychotechnics’, a system of aptitude testing and behavioural training devised by William Stern and Hugo Münsterberg. First used during the First World War, psychotechnics was rolled out across Germany civilian society to increase the productivity of a depleted workforce. Though relatively short-lived, the movement was vast in its scope and ambition, and its methods, which were also used in advertising, education, and mass entertainment, met with almost universal acclaim. One lone voice of dissent was Siegfried Kracauer, whose pioneering study The Salaried Masses (1930) uncovers the corrosive impact of psychotechnics on Weimar society, where it was used to select and exclude, to reshape behaviour and stifle critical dissent.

Franz Kafka’s manuscripts are among the greatest treasures of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The vast majority of hisNachlass is housed in the Bodleian’s special collections, and its presence has resulted in world-leading research and critical editions, in conferences and public exhibitions, outreach work and international collaborations. In this article I trace the journey of Kafka’s manuscripts, before reflecting on their legacy — on the opportunities and challenges of this collection and its role in a forward-looking and inclusive vision of Kafka studies in the twenty-first century. So how did the autographs of an early-twentieth-century Prague writer end up in Oxford? Interestingly, this situation is not (or only to a small extent) the result of targeted institutional collaboration and primarily the product of a mixture of chance and luck and, most importantly, of personal networks and connections. To unravel this story, it is necessary to go back to Kafka’s lifetime. One of the bestknown facts (or indeed myths) about Kafka is that he did not actually want the world to read his texts. Max Brod, his friend and posthumous editor, recounts a conversation in which Kafka told him to burn all his unpublished manuscripts after his death. Brod apparently replied that he would do no such thing, but after Kafka’s death in June 1924, he found two written notes which reiterated the instruction, probably written in late 1921 and November 1922 respectively.

Walter Benjamin's little-explored 1932 novella 'Das Taschentuch' combines theory and narrative practice. Its reflections on storytelling anticipate the argument of the 'Erzahler' essay, while its rescue narrative echoes Benjamin's essay on 'Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften'. In 'Das Taschentuch' Benjamin adapts Goethe's novella 'Die wunderlichen Nachbarskinder' for his own, technological age, considerably increasing the drama of the original. Like his 'Goethe' essay, however, Benjamin's novella is based on a misreading of Goethe's text. His biased reading reflects the centrality of rescue, Rettung, in his thought and in particular in his later, historical writings, where rescue takes on both a political and an existential dimension.

This chapter explores the presence of religious narratives and traditions in Modernist literature, arguing that it shapes both what authors write about and how they write. Drawing on texts by Trakl, Rilke, Brecht, Musil, Thomas Mann, Wolfenstein, Kafka and Sachs, the chapter explores the wide range of attitudes both towards established religion (Christianity and Judaism) and alternative forms of spirituality (occultism and spiritualism). For all their differences, Modernist authors focus on a set of recurring concerns: the tension between tradition and modernity; the relationship between self and God, and between self and other; the changing role of community; and existential experiences such as suffering, persecution and death. In times of war, social change and political upheaval, the relationship between literature and religion remains mutually productive. Modernist texts reflect the crisis of established religious traditions, but literature is also an active agent, a site where old and new attitudes towards spiritual matters can be explored.