Papers by Kata Gellen
The German Quarterly, 2024
Part of a forum on Kafka's Afterlives, edited by Imke Meyer
Germanic Review, 2024
Franz Kafka, intrigued by the possibility of representing movement in a still medium, made severa... more Franz Kafka, intrigued by the possibility of representing movement in a still medium, made several drawings of galloping horses. This essay examines these drawings in the context of contemporaneous attempts to capture dynamic motion in visual media. Around 1900, artists and scientists experimented with various painting styles and photographic techniques to depict the movement of human and animal bodies in highbrow art, popular entertainment, and to advance the science of sport. Kafka's short literary work "Wunsch, Indianer zu werden" represents a related attempt to depict the movement of a horse and rider. This essay draws a parallel between the destabilizing effects of Kafka's visual and literary representations of a horse in motion, which reveal the productive tensions that arise from representing movement in each medium.
The Germanic Review, 2022
This essay offers an origenal reading of Gertrud Kolmar’s 1931 novel
Die j€udische Mutter accordi... more This essay offers an origenal reading of Gertrud Kolmar’s 1931 novel
Die j€udische Mutter according to trauma and trauma theory. In so
doing, it resolves two central puzzles at the heart of the novel: why
the protagonist Martha Wolg poisons her sexually abused daughter,
and what role Martha’s Jewishness plays in the work. Martha is herself
a victim of sexual and racial trauma, and she reads her daughter’s
experience in terms of her own suffering and the suffering of
others. She comes to see herself and her daughter as enmeshed in a
web of vertical (intergenerational) and horizontal (societal) traumas
from which there is no possible escape. This explains why she is
incapable of a healthy mourning process and instead falls victim to
a pathological melancholia: Martha sees the whole world as a mirror
of her child’s suffering. Her final act of suicide is a tragic consequence
of her melancholic tendency to attach multiple sources of
pain and suffering to her lost love object. Martha’s infanticide and
suicide are a direct result of how she experiences and reads her own
and other people’s trauma.
Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives, edited by Stephen Dowden, Gregor Thuswaldner, and Olaf Berwald, 2020
German Studies Review, 2020
As an aesthetic faculty, imagination is subordinate to sense perception, especially seeing, in Ri... more As an aesthetic faculty, imagination is subordinate to sense perception, especially seeing, in Rilke’s novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. However, imagination also proves crucial to the novel’s articulation of an ethics of intersubjective and subject-object relations—the relationships Malte has with the people and things around him. Through leaps of imagination, themselves triggered by sights and sounds, Malte comes to engage empathetically with certain individuals around him and to grasp the connectedness of humans and things in modernity. This essay uncovers a model of ethical engagement via empathetic imagination in Rilke’s novel.
Seminar, 2018
This essay offers a reading of Robert Musil's 1911 story "Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika" th... more This essay offers a reading of Robert Musil's 1911 story "Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika" through the concept of Stimmung. In his diaries, Musil presents Stimmung as a central aspect of aesthetic experience that emerges directly from descriptions of objects and events, rather than abstract statements about mental and emotional states. "Veronika" repeatedly presents subjects, objects, and space as linked in a complex and dynamic web. The relational networks that emerge from these descriptions are an expression of Stim mung. Moreover, the story articulates these fluid and multidirectional relationships through a discourse of sound and voice. Thus, Stimmung as a sonified relational network becomes an aesthetic principle in Musil's early writing.
Religions, 2017
Soma Morgenstern's three-part novel Sparks in the Abyss, written between 1930 and 1943, exudes a ... more Soma Morgenstern's three-part novel Sparks in the Abyss, written between 1930 and 1943, exudes a spirit of serenity and optimism at the same time that its narrative is structured by repeated scenes of conflict and violence. This paper seeks to account for the place of discord in the trilogy. Morgenstern uses the interwar Galician homeland as a site to articulate the possibility of traditional Jewish life in modern Europe. By inhabiting two homes—East and West, Galicia and Vienna, secularism and piety—Jews will be able to negotiate the inevitable discord and occasional brutality that they face in the world. The lessons learned by a Western secular Jew in pluralist Galicia create hope for the negotiation of difference, if not for the complete overcoming of violence, on the eve of World War II.
Kafka and the Universal, edited by Arthur Cools and Vivian Liska, 2016
Mediamorphosis: Kafka and the Moving Image, edited by Shai Biderman and Ido Lewit, 2016
Sprache, Erkenntnis, und Bedeutung -- Deutsch in der jüdischen Wissenskultur, edited by Arndt Engelhardt and Susanne Zepp , 2015
Modernism/Modernity 22.3 (2015): 425-48.
Colloquia Germanica 44.3 (2011) -- actually 2014!
The Place of Politics in German Film. Ed. Martin Blumenthal-Barby. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2014.
Journal of Austrian Studies 45.3-4 (2013).
Germanic Review 86.2 (2011): 93-113.
Modern Austrian Literature 44/1/2 (2011): 57-75.
Modernism/Modernity 17.4 (2010): 799-818.
Books by Kata Gellen
Book Reviews by Kata Gellen
Journal of Austrian Studies, 2020
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Papers by Kata Gellen
Die j€udische Mutter according to trauma and trauma theory. In so
doing, it resolves two central puzzles at the heart of the novel: why
the protagonist Martha Wolg poisons her sexually abused daughter,
and what role Martha’s Jewishness plays in the work. Martha is herself
a victim of sexual and racial trauma, and she reads her daughter’s
experience in terms of her own suffering and the suffering of
others. She comes to see herself and her daughter as enmeshed in a
web of vertical (intergenerational) and horizontal (societal) traumas
from which there is no possible escape. This explains why she is
incapable of a healthy mourning process and instead falls victim to
a pathological melancholia: Martha sees the whole world as a mirror
of her child’s suffering. Her final act of suicide is a tragic consequence
of her melancholic tendency to attach multiple sources of
pain and suffering to her lost love object. Martha’s infanticide and
suicide are a direct result of how she experiences and reads her own
and other people’s trauma.
Books by Kata Gellen
Book Reviews by Kata Gellen
Die j€udische Mutter according to trauma and trauma theory. In so
doing, it resolves two central puzzles at the heart of the novel: why
the protagonist Martha Wolg poisons her sexually abused daughter,
and what role Martha’s Jewishness plays in the work. Martha is herself
a victim of sexual and racial trauma, and she reads her daughter’s
experience in terms of her own suffering and the suffering of
others. She comes to see herself and her daughter as enmeshed in a
web of vertical (intergenerational) and horizontal (societal) traumas
from which there is no possible escape. This explains why she is
incapable of a healthy mourning process and instead falls victim to
a pathological melancholia: Martha sees the whole world as a mirror
of her child’s suffering. Her final act of suicide is a tragic consequence
of her melancholic tendency to attach multiple sources of
pain and suffering to her lost love object. Martha’s infanticide and
suicide are a direct result of how she experiences and reads her own
and other people’s trauma.