European Leo Baeck Institute Lecture Series: Prof Vivian Liska on "‘Before the Law stands a doorkeep

References to the law pervade Kafka’s writings, but their meaning remains elusive.

It is precisely because it is uncertain whether the law in Kafka’s work is to be understood in juridical, religious, literary, or more generally ontological terms that it has elicited numerous and often contradictory interpretations. The lecture will explore how this indeterminacy and its effects have inspired concepts of justice in modernist thinkers as well as the relationship between law and narrative and its correlation with Jewish approaches to the interaction between Halacha and Aggadah.

Vivian Liska is Senior Professor of German literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her research focuses on modernist literature, German-Jewish literature and culture, and literary theory. She is the author of Die Nacht der Hymnen and Das schelmische Erhabene. Her most recent book is Fremde Gemeinschaft. Deutsch-jüdische Literatur der Moderne (2011).

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