Stanley Corngold

Stanley Corngold (born 11 June 1934) is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton, where he taught for more than 40 years. He is an executive committee member and past president of the Kafka Society of America as well as advisory editor of the Journal of the Kafka Society.

Stanley Corngold was born on June 11, 1934, in Brooklyn, New York City, New York.

Corngold did his undergraduate study at Columbia University, New York. His education was paused by two years of service in the U.S. Army, following which, he graduated from Columbia with special distinction in English in 1957.

His postgraduate transition toward the study of German and comparative literature took place at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where he studied Sanskrit, and again at Columbia, where he studied German. 

After teaching as an instructor in the European Division of the University of Maryland, he entered the Ph.D. program in comparative literature at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. He received his doctorate in 1968 with a dissertation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant directed by Paul de Man, Robert Merrihew Adams, and O. J. Matthijs Jolles. 

While at Cornell, he was a Teaching Assistant in French (September 1964 - June 1965).

After finishing his education, Corngold began working as an assistant professor of Germanic languages and literature at Princeton University, in 1966. He was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 1972 and was named associate professor of comparative literature in 1979. He has served as Professor of German and comparative literature at Princeton University since 1981.

Since 2009, Corngold is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton. On his retirement in 2009, he received the Howard T. Behrman Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton. In fall 2009, he conducted four seminars on his own work at King's College, Cambridge, where he was a Visiting Fellow; in fall 2010, he was a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.

Corngold founded and directed the Princeton Kafka Network with Oxford and Humboldt Universities between 2009-2012. In 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Works

Corngold has published widely on modern German writers and thinkers (e.g., Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Nietzsche, Robert Musil, Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, among others), but for the most part, he has translated and written on the work of Franz Kafka. 

He recently co-edited, with commentary, a translation of Kafka's main office writings, which 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.

Together with Benno Wagner, he has published a new book titled Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine, which highlights Kafka's professional experience as an influential insurance lawyer. 

In 2011, Corngold co-edited with Ruth V. Gross a volume of essays on Kafka titled Kafka for the Twenty-First Century. He also co-edited a special issue of Monatshefte devoted to papers given at the Kafka Network at Princeton in 2010 and translated Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sufferings of Young Werther. Since then, he has published a Norton Critical Edition of the same eighteenth-century novel (2012) and a Modern Library edition of Kafka's Metamorphosis(2013). In 2018, Princeton brought out his intellectual biography Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic. He is now completing a book tentatively titled Thomas Mann in Princeton, 1938-1941, with Erich Kahler, Hermann Broch, and Albert Einstein.

Corngold continues to be active on the lecture circuit, having recently spoken at Harvard; Brown; University College Cork (Eire); the Tekè Gallery in Carrara, Italy; the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft in Berlin, and the University of Toronto. In fall 2018, he delivered the Thomas Mann Lecture at the ETH (Zurich), and in 2019, he spoke at Dartmouth University on the Thomas Mann Family.