Join the Department of Music for a talk titled “On the Musically Kafkaesque” Friday, Sept. 27, from 4 to 5 p.m. in Harkness Chapel.
About the talk
Although the Kafka famously insisted that he was unmusical, Theodor W. Adorno upheld him as the first writer to treat language as music, and Stanley Corngold suggested that music was the originary “traumatic event” from which Kafka spent the rest of his life running. This talk develops the notion of Kafka as an unmusical-musical writer to advance a larger claim: the musically Kafkaesque offers a yet unheard auditory diagnostic for pathologies of the modern condition, whose abiding symptoms range from the obscure to the obvious and from the acute to the chronic. It will feature works that consider crises of musical communication in postwar Germany, sonic distortions that are both glitch and feature, and existential dread in rock music.
About the speaker
Samantha Heinle works on the intersection of music and literature from 1800 to the present. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University with a dissertation on music as a medium of
communication in three compositions on texts by Franz Kafka. Her current book project, On the Musically Kafkaesque, listens in to Kafkaesque facets of the modern condition made audible through the sonic reception of Kafka’s work.
After earning an A.B. in music and comparative literature from Harvard University, Heinle was
awarded a Fulbright Grant to conduct research at the archive of the Gesellschaft der
Musikfreunde in Vienna, Austria. Her scholarship has also been supported by grants from the
Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame, the Austrian
Cultural Forum, the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University, and a Don M. Randel
Teaching and Research Fellowship.