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A reminder that registration for the Symposium on Kafka's Betrachtung closes on 8 March. For further information and to register, please go to http://www.kafka-research.ox.ac.uk/activities/07kafka_Betrachtung.php Kafka’s Betrachtung – 100 Years On Wadham College Oxford, Old Seminar Room 23 March 2012 2012 marks the centenary of the publication of Franz Kafka’s first book, Betrachtung. This offers an ideal opportunity to return to Kafka’s collection of short prose texts, which has long suffered critical neglect. With Betrachtung, Kafka takes stock of his achievements to date, assembling texts written over the course of at least half a decade, but he also prepares the ground for new literary ventures. The collection shows Kafka on the threshold of his ‘mature’ style, but at a stage when he was still more openly influenced by other literary and cultural paradigms, such as Symbolism, Expressionism and the new medium of film. The aim of the symposium is to put Betrachtung firmly back on the critical map, and to emphasise its significance for Kafka’s writings and for German literature as a whole. To this end, the symposium will combine close readings of Betrachtung with papers which will put the collection into its wider context(s): of Kafka’s oeuvre as a whole, of Modernist literature and culture, and of the literary tradition more generally. Programme 9.00: Carolin Duttlinger (Oxford): Welcome and introduction 9.30-11.00: Elizabeth Boa (Nottingham): Movement in Space: Topographies of Self and World in Betrachtung Roland Reuß (Heidelberg): Handlung und Reflexion in Kafkas Geschichte 'Die Bäume' 11.00: Coffee break 11.30-13.00: Benno Wagner (Siegen/Taipei): Ausflug ins Gebirge: Topographie und Association bei Stifter, Nietzsche und Kafka Manfred Engel (Univ. des Saarlandes): Bedeutungserzeugung: Zur Modifikation impressionistischer und symbolistischer Verfahren in Kafkas Betrachtung 13.00: Lunch 14.00-15.30: Gerhard Neumann (München/Berlin): Betrachtung: Zu Kafkas frühen Bewegungsstudien Silke Horstkotte (Leipzig/Tübingen): Der Blick, die Geste: Stummfilmnarrativität in der Betrachtung 15.30: Coffee break 16.00-17.30: Lucia Ruprecht (Cambridge): Virtuoso Underachievement in Kafka's Betrachtung Ritchie Robertson (Oxford): 'Das Jahrhundert des Kindes': Children and Childhood in Kafka's Work Convenor: Carolin Duttlinger Hosted by the Oxford Kafka Research Centre; funded by the MHRA, the John Fell Fund, and the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Oxford University.