Imprints in the cosmic background radiation: Franz Kafka and the multiverse

Kata Gellen is Associate Professor of German Studies and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke University. Her main areas of research and teaching include German literary modernism, German-Jewish studies, postwar Austrian literature and cinema, film studies, and sound studies. She is the author of Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism (Northwestern University Press, 2019) and numerous essays on writers including Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrud Kolmar, Günther Anders, and Thomas Bernhard, as well as essays on Weimar Cinema. Her book, Galicia as a Literary Idea: Jewish Eastern Europe in the Writings of Joseph Roth and Soma Morgenstern, will be published with the University of Toronto Press in 2026. She is currently writing a book on contemporary transgressive Austrian cinema called Ulrich Seidl, Brutal Humanist.

Kafka and Noise grapples with the many inscrutable voices and senseless sounds in Kafka's writings by applying concepts from film theory to them. The point, however, is not to explore how film shaped Kafka's writings but to use film as a methodological framework that helps to unravel the sonic effects in Kafka’s writings. This approach reveals how noise persistently pushes against the borders of the literary medium, which makes it a productive way to explore the limits and possibilities of literary expression. The struggle with noise thus enables Kafka to broach major questions of modernist literary aesthetics, including temporality, voice, unknowability, and the transcendence of fictional worlds (metalepsis). Kafka and Noise thus argues that literature, a silent medium, can offer unique insights into how we think about sound, and thereby presents a new model of intermediality in literary modernism.

Galicia as a Literary Idea asks why Galicia, the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian empire, held such a prominent place in the literary imagination of Joseph Roth (1894-1939) and Soma Morgenstern (1890-1976), two German-language Jewish writers who were born and raised there. The book argues that the idea of Galicia allows Roth and Morgenstern to explore the place of Jewish tradition in modernity in the 1930s and 1940s, a time of upheaval and devastation for European Jews. They invoke Galicia in their writings not out of a nostalgic and irrational desire to return to a lost world or to idealize the plight and suffering of Jews, but to face the challenges of their present moment. For Roth and Morgenstern, the literary idea of Galicia is characterized above all by continuous struggle amidst crisis, conflict, and catastrophe, as well as emergent hope, whether in the form of earthly possibility or redemptive promise.

Gellen teaches courses in English and German at all levels, from first-year seminars to lecture courses and graduate-level seminars. Recent courses include "Brutal Humanism in Postwar Austria" (graduate seminar), "German-Jewish Culture: Vienna, Prague, Berlin" (upper-level undergraduate course in German), "Surveillance & Society" (first-year seminar in English), and "Germany Confronts Nazism and the Holocaust" (lecture course for undergraduates).