Stanley Corngold

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A new translation of the classic tale of youthful angst, unrequited love and tragedy originally published in 1774 depicts a series of letters from a young artist to his friend about a beautiful but engaged peasant girl.

The Sufferings of Young Werther: A New Translation

Complex Pleasure deals with questions of literary feeling in eight major German writersLessing, Kant, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Musil, Kafka, Trakl, and Benjamin. On the basis of close readings of these authors Stanley Corngold makes vivid the following ideas: that where there is literature there is complex pleasure; that this pleasure is complex because it involves the impression of a disclosure; that this thought is foremost in the minds of a number of canonical writers; that important literary works in the German traditionfiction, poetry, critiquecan be illuminated through their treatment of literary feeling; and, finally, that the conceptual terms for these forms of feeling continually vary. The types of feeling treated in Complex Pleasure include wit (the startling perception of likeness) and the disinterested pleasure of aesthetic judgment; Hölderlins swift conceptual grasp, in which the tempo of the process of thought is stressed; artistic imagination, mood, sadistic enjoyment, rapturous distraction, homonymic dissonance, and courage as a mode of literary experience. At the same time, through the deftness, range, and surprise of its execution, the book itself conveys complex pleasure. The reader will also find fascinating, hitherto untranslated material by Nietzsche (On Moods) and Kafka (important sections from his journals and from his unfinished novel The Boy Who Sank Out of Sight).

Forms of Feeling in German Literature

Complex Pleasure

In this new volume of Kafka studies, which is addressed to both beginning readers of Kafka as well as Kafka scholars, Stanley Corngold discusses Kafka's work in a variety of novel perspectives, including Goethe's The Sufferings of Young Werther; Nietzsche's conception of aphoristic form; bureaucratic organization; accident and risk; the logic of possession and inheritance; and myth, among others. Even as Corngold explores Kafka's work across different fields and tangents, he does so in vivid, readable prose, free of jargon, and with an eye to Kafka's ongoing relevance to the concerns of his day and ours. Taken together these linked essays reveal Kafka in his astonishing many-sidedness.

Selected Essays

Expeditions to Kafka

"The first complete account of the ideas and writings of a major figure in twentieth-century intellectual life. Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980) was a charismatic philosopher, critic, translator, and poet who fled Nazi Germany at the age of eighteen, emigrating alone to the United States. He was astonishingly prolific until his untimely death at age fifty-nine, writing some dozen major books, all marked by breathtaking erudition and a provocative essayistic style. He single-handedly rehabilitated Nietzsche's reputation after World War II and was enormously influential in introducing postwar American readers to existentialism. Until now, no book has examined his intellectual legacy. Stanley Corngold provides the first in-depth study of Kaufmann's thought, covering all his major works. He shows how Kaufmann speaks to many issues that concern us today, such as the good of philosophy, the effects of religion, the persistence of tragedy, and the crisis of the humanities in an age of technology. Few scholars in modern times can match Kaufmann's range of interests, from philosophy and literature to intellectual history and comparative religion, from psychology and photography to art and architecture. Corngold provides a heartfelt portrait of a man who, to an extraordinary extent, transfigured his personal experience in the pages of his books. This original study, both appreciative and critical, is the definitive intellectual life of one of the twentieth century's most engaging yet neglected thinkers. It will introduce Kaufmann to a new generation of readers and serves as a fitting tribute to a scholar's incomparable libido sciendi, or lust for knowledge."--

Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic

Walter Kaufmann

Thomas Mann arrived in Princeton in 1938, in exile from Nazi Germany, and feted in his new country as “the greatest living man of letters.” This beautiful new book from literary critic Stanley Corngold tells the little known story of Mann's early years in America and his encounters with a group of highly gifted émigrés in Princeton, which came to be called the Kahler Circle, with Mann at its center. The Circle included immensely creative, mostly German-speaking exiles from Nazism, foremost Mann, Erich Kahler, Hermann Broch, and Albert Einstein, all of whom, during the Circle's nascent years in Princeton, were “stupendously” productive. In clear, engaging prose, Corngold explores the traces the Circle left behind during Mann's stay in Princeton, treating literary works and political statements, anecdotes, contemporary history, and the Circle's afterlife. Weimar in Princeton portrays a fascinating scene of cultural production, at a critical juncture in the 20th century, and the experiences of an extraordinary group of writers and thinkers who gathered together to mourn a lost culture and to reckon with the new world in which they had arrived.

Thomas Mann and the Kahler Circle

Weimar in Princeton

Irene Giersing

Borrowed Lives is a novel. It is an enactment of issues of literary philosophy and criticism, including the question of whether there can be originality, coherence, and authenticity in life and art. It deepens William Blake's point -- Make your own myth or else be enslaved by another man's -- by asking whether one's own myth isn't also another man's myth and by portraying the terrible consequences of taking one's own myth literally.

Borrowed Lives

Metamorphosis of the Metaphor

Kafka's Die Verwandlung

The Interpretation of Kafka's Metamorphosis

The Commentators' Despair

"An impressive tour de force. . . . "The Fate of the Self" is precisely the kind of book one will want to read closely, learn from appreciatively, and engage in strenuous debate."--Dominick LaCapra, Cornell University

German Writers and French Theory

The Fate of the Self

Ruth V. Gross

Franz Kafka's literary career began in the first decade of the twentieth century and produced some of the most fascinating and influential works in all of modern European literature. Now, a hundred years later, the concerns of a new century call for a look at the challenges facing Kafka scholarship in the decades ahead: What more can we hope to learn about the context in which Kafka wrote? How does understanding that context affect how we read his stories? What are the consequences of new critical editions that offer unprecedented access to Kafka's works in manuscript form? How does our view of Kafka change the priorities and fashions of literary scholarship? What elements in Kafka's fiction will find resonance in the historical context of a new millennium? How do we compose a coherent account of a personality with so many contradictory aspects? All these questions and more are addressed by the essays in this volume, written by a group of leading international Kafka scholars. Contributors: Peter Beicken, Iris Bruce, Jacob Burnett, Uta Degner, Doreen Densky, Katja Garloff, Rolf Goebel, Mark Harman, Robert Lemon, Roland Reu, Ritchie Robertson, Walter Sokel, John Zilcosky, Saskia Ziolkowski. Stanley Corngold is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Ruth V. Gross is Professor of German and Head of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at North Carolina State University.

Kafka for the Twenty-first Century

"In Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, the American critic and translator of Franz Kafka traces the implications of Kafka's literary breakthrough. Kafka's first concern was not his responsibility to his culture but to his fate as literature, which he pursued by exploring "the limits of the human." At the same time, he kept his transcendental longings sober by noting - with incomparable irony - their virtual impossibility.".

Franz Kafka

Lambent Traces

On the night of September 22, 1912, Franz Kafka wrote his story "The Judgment," which came out of him "like a regular birth." This act of creation struck him as an unmistakable sign of his literary destiny. Thereafter, the search of many of his characters for the Law, for a home, for artistic fulfillment can be understood as a figure for Kafka's own search to reproduce the ecstasy of a single night. In Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, the preeminent American critic and translator of Franz Kafka traces the implications of Kafka's literary breakthrough. Kafka's first concern was not his responsibility to his culture but to his fate as literature, which he pursued by exploring "the limits of the human." At the same time, he kept his transcendental longings sober by noting--with incomparable irony--their virtual impossibility. At times Kafka's passion for personal transcendence as a writer entered into a torturous and witty conflict with his desire for another sort of transcendence, one driven by a modern Gnosticism. This struggle prompted him continually to scrutinize different kinds of mediation, such as confessional writing, the dream, the media, the idea of marriage, skepticism, asceticism, and the imitation of death. Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka concludes with a reconstruction and critique of the approaches to Kafka by such major critics as Adorno, Gilman, and Deleuze and Guattari..

In this new volume of Kafka studies, which is addressed to both beginning readers of Kafka as well as Kafka scholars, Stanley Corngold discusses Kafka's work in a variety of novel perspectives, including Nietzsche's seminal Birth of Tragedy; the logic of possession and inheritance; anorexia; theories of literary interpretation; myth; Kafka and the logic of organization; and aphoristic form, among others. Even as Corngold explores Kafka's work across different fields and tangents, he does so in vivid, readable prose, free of jargon, and with an eye to Kafka's ongoing relevance to the concerns of his day and ours. Taken together these linked essays reveal Kafka in his astonishing many-sidedness.

Gerhard Richter

Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship: Essays in Honor of Stanley Corngold

Essays in Honor of Stanley Corngold

Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship

Much recent critical theory has dismissed or failed to take seriously the question of the self. French theorists—such as Derrida, Barthes, Benveniste, Foucault, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss—have in various ways proclaimed the death of the subject, often turning to German intellectual tradition to authorize their views. Stanley Corngold's heralded book, The Fate of the Self, published for the first time in paperback with a spirited new preface, appears at a time when the relationship between the self and literature is a matter of renewed concern. Originally published in 1986 (Columbia University Press), the book examines the poetic self of German intellectual tradition in light of recent French and American critical theory. Focusing on seven major German writers—Hölderlin, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Mann, Kafka, Freud, and Heidegger—Corngold shows that their work does not support the desire to discredit the self as an origin of meaning and value but reconstructs the allegedly fragmented poetic self through effects of position and style. Offering new and subtle models of selfhood, The Fate of the Self is a source of rich insight into the work of these authors, refracted through poststructuralist critical perspectives.

In Stanley Corngold’s view, the themes and strategies of Kafka’s fiction are generated by a tension between his concern for writing and his growing sense of its arbitrary character. Analyzing Kafka’s work in light of "the necessity of form," which is also a merely formal necessity, Corngold uncovers the fundamental paradox of Kafka’s art and life. The first section of the book shows how Kafka’s rhetoric may be understood as the daring project of a man compelled to live his life as literature. In the central part of the book, Corngold reflects on the place of Kafka within the modern tradition, discussing such influential precursors of Cervantes, Flaubert, and Nietzsche, whose works display a comparable narrative disruption. Kafka’s distinctive narrative strategies, Corngold points out, demand interpretation at the same time they resist it. Critics of Kafka, he says, must be aware that their approaches are guided by the principles that Kafka’s fiction identifies, dramatizes, and rejects.

The Necessity of Form

"In the years 1938-1941, Princeton was home to an extraordinary constellation of émigré intellectuals-including a particular quartet of thinkers: the novelists Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch, Albert Einstein, and perhaps the least well known of the group, a professor and polymath at the Institute for Advanced Study, Eric Kahler. This book aims to tell the story of their intimate artistic, political, and intellectual activity during the years of Mann's residence in Princeton as a Professor of Humanities at Princeton. The group, who met one another often, mainly at the house of Kahler or Mann, was termed by Charles Greenleaf Bell, a young poet and ardent disciple of Kahler, the "Kahler-Circle." They were fiercely productive scholars. During Mann's residence, he finished his "Goethe-novel" Lotte in Weimar; composed a surrealistic Indian novella The Transposed Heads; and resumed work on the last novel in his epic tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers. He read aloud from these works, while they were in progress, to Kahler and Broch. Kahler in turn discussed his political essays with Mann and was a deeply engaged critic of Mann's fiction; and Mann relied on Kahler, a polymathic intellectual historian and his closest friend, for his political sagacity. Broch, too, read sections of his epic novel The Death of Vergil aloud to Mann and Kahler, his host. Einstein, for all the likeness of his political views with Mann's, preferred the company of Kahler and Broch to that of Mann, whom he termed "an oppressive schoolmaster." To his friends, Einstein was an inspiration, both for his thought and his material support: he also lent Kahler the money to buy the celebrated house at One Evelyn Place and accommodated the impoverished Broch as a house sitter. Kahler at the time was writing what likely be his most widely known book, Man the Measure, which was published two years late in 1943 and for which Einstein wrote the foreword. Corngold aims to tell the story of the story of the intertwined lives and minds of these four great thinkers during their overlapping residence in Princeton during a time of both political and cultural crisis. and culturally pivotal period. He will draw on rich sources for their interactions: Mann's diaries from 1938-1941, foremost, as well as edited volumes of the correspondence of Mann and Kahler, Mann and Broch, and Kahler and Broch. Until now there is no single book that encompasses the precarious but perfervid intellectual life of them all. Corngold will be measuring the extent to which their personal exchanges affected their writings and their political activity"--

Thomas Mann in Princeton

The Mind in Exile

A unique look at Thomas Mann’s intellectual and political transformation during the crucial years of his exile in the United States In September 1938, Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize–winning author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, fled Nazi Germany for the United States. Heralded as “the greatest living man of letters,” Mann settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where, for nearly three years, he was stunningly productive as a novelist, university lecturer, and public intellectual. In The Mind in Exile, Stanley Corngold portrays in vivid detail this crucial station in Mann’s journey from arch-European conservative to liberal conservative to ardent social democrat. On the knife-edge of an exile that would last fully fourteen years, Mann declared, “Where I am, there is Germany. I carry my German culture in me.” At Princeton, Mann nourished an authentic German culture that he furiously observed was “going to the dogs” under Hitler. Here, he wrote great chunks of his brilliant novel Lotte in Weimar (The Beloved Returns); the witty novella The Transposed Heads; and the first chapters of Joseph the Provider, which contain intimations of his beloved President Roosevelt’s economic policies. Each of Mann’s university lectures—on Goethe, Freud, Wagner—attracted nearly 1,000 auditors, among them the baseball catcher, linguist, and O.S.S. spy Moe Berg. Meanwhile, Mann had the determination to travel throughout the United States, where he delivered countless speeches in defense of democratic values. In Princeton, Mann exercised his “stupendous capacity for work” in a circle of friends, all highly accomplished exiles, including Hermann Broch, Albert Einstein, and Erich Kahler. The Mind in Exile portrays this luminous constellation of intellectuals at an extraordinary time and place.

Stanley Corngold

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