Kata Gellen CV

My main areas of research are German modernism, German-Jewish literature, Weimar cinema, and postwar Austrian literature and film. My book, Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism, appeared with Northwestern University Press in 2019. In this study, I employ film theory to account for noise in Kafka’s writings—the inscrutable voices and senseless sounds produced by humans, animals, the natural world, and new technology. Rather than read these noises as an attempt to capture the cacophony of modernity, I see them as fundamentally out of place in the literary medium that contains them. However they gain legibility when we analyze them with the tools and vocabulary developed to discuss the phenomenon of sound in cinema. This approach reveals how noise persistently pushes against the borders of the literary medium, which makes it a useful means for exploring the limits and possibilities of literary expression. The struggle with noise thus enables Kafka to broach major questions of modernist literary aesthetics, including temporality, voice, and the transcendence of fictional worlds.

I recently completed a manuscript titled Galicia as a Literary Idea: Jewish Eastern Europe in the Writings of Joseph Roth and Soma Morgenstern. In this study, I argue that Galicia, the easternmost region of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, plays a central yet underexamined role in literary works by Joseph Roth (1894-1939) and Soma Morgenstern (1890-1976). Writing during the 1930s and 1940s, a period of crisis and upheaval for European Jews, Roth and Morgenstern turned to Galicia and traditional Jewish life not (or not only) to escape into the past and imaginatively recover a "lost world," but because this place allowed them to explore a range of urgent questions about Jewishness, modernity, and tradition—in particular, the role of the East in imagining Jewish futures. The manuscript is currently under review.

In addition to these book projects, I have published articles on writers including Thomas Bernhard, Gertrud Kolmar, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Günther Anders. I have also written on Weimar Cinema, in particular the films M, Der blaue Engel, and Nosferatu. I have an enduring passion for contemporary Austrian cinema, and hope one day to write about the films of Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl.

I enjoy teaching courses in English and German at all levels, from first-year seminars to lecture courses and graduate-level seminars. Recent courses I have taught include "Brutal Humanism in Postwar Austria" (graduate seminar), "German-Jewish Culture: Vienna, Prague, Berlin" (upper-level undergraduate course in German), "Surveillance & Society" (first-year seminar in English), and "Germany Confronts Nazism and the Holocaust" (lecture course for undergraduates).