EVENT DETAILS

A talk by Professor Imke Meyer, Helen Herrmann Professor and Co-Chair at Bryn Mawr College, "Labor Pains: Kafka's 'Hunger Artist' and the Birth of the Bourgeois Subject."

"Labor Pains: Kafka's 'Hunger Artist' and the Birth of the Bourgeois Subject."

Reception to follow.

Abstract: Time and again, commentators of Kafka’s “Hunger Artist” have interpreted the protagonist as a figure chiefly characterized by his refusal to integrate into the bourgeois world and its institutions. It is Kafka’s narrator, of course, who repeatedly tempts us into reading the hunger artist as a figure who stands apart from the bourgeois sphere. After all, from the outset of the text, the very designation of the protagonist as an artist identifies him as someone who potentially occupies the position of an outsider and—as such—a privileged observer. And yet, while there is ample justification to read the hunger artist as an outsider, this talk will argue that the hunger artist also serves as a powerful allegory of the performative contradictions of bourgeois subject construction. While the hunger artist’s art is primarily characterized by negativity, absences, and gestures of refusal, it also is a testament to a fanatical drive to achieve. Seen in this light, the hunger artist’s ascetic life testifies to an entrenched Protestant work ethic. This talk will explore the implications of this observation.