Das Heft 1 des SLUB-Kuriers 1995 präsentierte vier wertvolle Erstausgaben des Prager Dichtergenies als wichtigen Schatz der Bibliothek. "Ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns" nannte er den wesentlichen Lektürekatalysator und seine zeitlos eskalierenden eigengesetzlichkeiten des menschlichen Ausgeliefertseins bewegen die Leser atemlos ....

The paper focuses on the possibilities and potential of connecting live performance with new media. Our attempt is to find alternative strategies for theatre/performance relations with media, in this case digital media, by means of placing the theatre/performance within contemporary art production, developing strategies of production, which is developing a culture of usage. “In this new form of culture, which one might call a culture of use or a culture of activity, the artwork functions as the temporary terminal of a network of interconnected elements, like a narrative that extends and reinterprets preceding narratives.” [Nicolas Bourriaud: Postproduction, New York 2002] The project we are going to introduce is based on collaborative research, in which artistic and scientific approaches overlap and fuse.

Thesis advisor: Roberta T. Manning / Although born in Prague under the Austro-Hungarian Empire and dying before Stalin took control of the USSR, Kafka clairvoyantly understood the full paradox of Soviet authoritarianism. His short parable “Before the Law” provides an interesting intellectual exercise for anyone wishing to study Soviet law, for in Russia it evokes tragic truth. The man who futilely attempted to reach the law is a metaphor for Russian masses seeking the same goal. Just as the doorkeeper with his air of conscious superiority and vacillating temperament mirrors the nature of Soviet rulers. The absurdity that underpins Kafka's work poignantly and painfully parallels the arbitrary ‘justice' of Stalin's rule. The man's futile search is symbolic of the many purge victims who, while wasting away in the gulags, clung to the slim hope of using legal means to exonerate themselves. Through an intellectual and visceral response, Kafka conveys the authoritarian split between the elite and the masses in Russia. No one knows how many countless Russian and Soviet citizens' lives were wasted in the same shadow of indifferent omnipotence. And we are forced to ask why the law was kept from them. And yet, what fueled the insatiable pursuit of the law in the face of certain futility? Even the Purges took place within a legal framework, as perverse as it may have been. But was Communist legality simply an oxymoron, or was there something more? / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2003. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Zugl.: Berlin, Freie Univ., Diss., 2009

Zugl.: Bonn, Univ., Diss., 2007

The following study investigates the fictional works of an early twentieth century Czechoslovakian writer named Franz Kafka. "The space of Kafka" is explored primarily through the "identity" of his characteristic monster figures and the temporally disjunctive narratives through which they travel. Monstrosity is qualified here as a principal mode of translation through which Kafka engaged the very terms of "identity" which an "individual" faces in the appearance of any "work". The intimations of a monstrous self are probed through Kafka's work in relation to human experience, intentionality, alterity and a "present" which is en-acted specifically as one form of the past. Through Kafka's paradigmatic "monster", "double" and "bachelor" figures, we find not "alternative" orientations of the "self" which contemporary literature and architecture may choose to undertake, but intrinsic re-presentations of the very relation which any self, any author, already is in the appearance of a "work".

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) wrote this little phrase one day in a notebook: Writing as a form of prayer. This dissertation will examine his highly personal and Judaic conception of the act of writing in order to demonstrate that it constitutes in fact the cornerstone of Kafka's activity as a writer and that it can be traced in a significant number of his literary works as their regulating instance. / In order to do so, we will first examine the social, political and economic conditions prevailing in Central Europe at the turn of the 20th century, in order to ascertain its tremendous impact on the Jewish communities living in that part of the world, in terms of loss of traditional Jewish identity culminating in many cases in assimilation. Kafka's work will thus firstly be situated in the historical and political context out of which it emerged. / In the course of this work, we have used the concepts of sacre and profane as developed by the historian of religions Mircea Eliade throughout in order to demonstrate that there exists in Kafka's work a constitutive tension articulated between those two poles, not only at the level of the plot, but at the level of language itself. / Since the central element at the root of this tension is expressed in terms of presence and absence, we have also analysed the philosophy of language of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, which are themselves articulated exactly in those terms. / The use of these categories has helped us show that if Kafka's work is indeed at time very close to that of Scholem and Benjamin, especially in its literary rendition of motives underlining the absence of the divine in language, it also distinguishes itself markedly from the work of the two philosophers by the use of other motives which underline the immediate presence of the message of Revelation, made directly accessible within the modern and profane language, which is also that of literature.

This thesis explores the critical question of the ethics of creation as it emerges to the forefront of contemporary thought in the late twentieth century. The question is examined through three independent yet interrelated motifs: the legend of the Golem, the symbol of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, and the literature of Franz Kafka. An understanding of these three motifs, in all their implications, can provide valuable commentary and insightful reflections so that a discourse on a possible moral and ethical ground for affirmative creation can be engaged. It is imperative, in light of the destructive potentiality of our creative making, to address this discourse if architecture is to regain cultural relevance.

Univ., Diss.--Rostock, 2005.

Zugl.: Wien, Univ., Diss., 2004