Stanley A. Corngold

Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature

219 East Pyne
corngold@Princeton.EDU
phone: 609-258-4137 ; fax: 609-258-5597
Website
C.V.

Stanley Corngold, a graduate of Columbia and Cornell Universities, is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton. He 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. Together with Professor Benno Wagner of the University of Siegen and the eminent civil-rights lawyer Jack Greenberg of the Columbia Law School, Corngold edited, with commentary, a translation of Franz Kafka's main office writings. (In the years 1908-1922 Kafka rose to a high-ranking position at the partly government-run Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia and during the War years was its virtual CEO.) The volume, titled Kafka before the Law: the Office Writings, appeared in 2008 and 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. At Princeton, in 2006, Corngold taught the graduate seminar “Kafka before the Law” and together with Jack Greenberg co-taught a similar course “Kafka and the Law” at Columbia Law School in 2006 and 2007. On his retirement in 2009, Corngold received the Howard T. Behrman Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton. Now, in fall 2009, he is conducting 4 seminars on his own work at King's College, Cambridge, where he is a Visiting Fellow; in fall 2010, he will be a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.  Together with Benno, he is completing a book titled "Franz Kafka: Wit, Sex, and Technics," which will again highlight Kafka's professional experience as an influential insurance lawyer. 

Life after LAPA

In addition to his work at King's College, Cambridge, and his forthcoming fellowship to the American Academy in Berlin,  Corngold co-directs the Princeton Kafka Network with Oxford and Humboldt Universities. He is also co-editing (with Ruth V. Gross) a collection of essays on Kafka titled "Kafka for the Twenty-First Century" and translating and editing  Goethe's "The Sufferings of Young Werther" for Norton Critical Editions. 

Publications

Please see CV.