TO JUDGE BY THE AMOUNT OF KAFKA SCHOLARSHIP that has appeared in the last few years, it is safe to say that Franz Kafka is alive and well in the twenty-first century. This fact should not surprise us, since we know that Kafka was the most widely read German author in the last half of the previous century and that there has hardly been a period since the Second World War in which Kafka scholarship has not thrived. But with all the extant criticism and interest in this author whose published works are a nano-fraction of the material that has been published about them, there is, of course, always also a danger. From the beginning, Kafka was the new, the different, the true representative of modernity. We have read his works through religious, existentialist, structuralist, and more recently, postmodern perspectives. The “period of slackening” that Jean François Lyotard described decades ago as the beginning of a certain version of postmodernism entails an “end to experimentation,” and in our discourse of literature this lull suggests the possibility of what one might call “Kafka exhaustion.” Can there be a permanent avatar of the avant-garde? How does the indisputable status of a classic accord with the indisputable role of a disruptor, an instigator of the new? The paradoxes of Kafka’s position in world culture lead to the same question — “Kafka, again?” The answer, of course, has always been, and continues to be, “Yes, Kafka, again.”

Why these thoughts now? Although it could be argued that turns-of-century are artificial markers, we tend to give them considerable attention and look to them as signposts of cultural change. In this spirit a conference with the subject “Kafka at 125” — a celebration of Kafka’s 125th birthday — was held in the Research Triangle of North Carolina in April 2009. Clayton Koelb, James Rolleston, and Ruth V. Gross, the organizers of the conference, each a member of one of the three research universities in the Triangle and each a veteran Kafka scholar, felt that the concerns of a new century called for a fresh look not only at what Kafka meant to the preceding century but also at what challenges his works might offer to the decades ahead.