Comparative Literature

Stanley Corngold, a graduate of Columbia and Cornell Universities, has published widely on modern German writers and thinkers (e.g., Dilthey, Nietzsche, Musil, Kraus, Mann, Benjamin, Adorno, among others), but for the most part he has been translating and writing on the work of Franz Kafka. He recently co-edited, with commentary, a translation of Kafka’s main office writings, which describes the place of these documents in the history of worker's compensation insurance as well as their importance for an understanding of Kafka’s novels and stories. On his retirement in 2009, Corngold received the Howard T. Behrman Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton. In fall 2009, he conducted 4 seminars on his own work at King's College, Cambridge, where he was a Visiting Fellow; in fall 2010, he was a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. Together with Benno Wagner, he has published a new book titled Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine, which again highlights Kafka's professional experience as an influential insurance lawyer. In 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Corngold co-directs the Princeton Kafka Network with Oxford and Humboldt Universities. This year (2011), he has also co-edited a volume of essays on Kafka titled Kafka for the Twenty-First Century; co-edited a special issue of Monatshefte devoted to papers given at the Kafka Network at Princeton in 2010; and translated Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther. He is now preparing a Norton Critical Edition of the same 18th-century novel. He continues to be active on the lecture circuit, with gigs forthcoming at Princeton, Harvard, Utah, Clark, Tamkang (Taiwan), and Oxford.