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| Library status: currently open during regularly scheduled hours. |
For books and articles about art in the age of Modernism, please see the class guide, "Traditions of Art II." Find the guide here: https://libguides.ltu.edu/c.php?g=989951&p=7161038
CliffsNotes on Kafka's The Trial by
Kafka's books are filled with the blurring of reality and dreams. The "real" world is never enough for Kafka's characters, and they are always left yearning for a firm metaphysical anchor that they can never quite grasp. This book describes a man's persecution by an overwhelming power.
Constructive Destruction: Kafka's Aphorisms, Literary Tradition, and Literary Transformation by
The study presents a thorough investigation of Kafka's aphoristic writings, examining them in terms of the history of the aphorism in Germany, and paying special regard to Kafka's contemporary Austrian aphorists. Emphasis is placed on the role of the aphorism in the development of Kafka's literary creativity. Aphoristic discourse presented itself to Kafka as a possible manner of resolving specific conflicts in his life and art, above all the crisis of communication the individuality of the self. Aphoristic structure provides the transitional link between Kafka´s early perspectivistic narratives and the parables of the later period.
Franz Kafka by
-- Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights -- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world -- from the English medievalists to contemporary writers
Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis by
A collection of critical essays on Kafka's novel, arranged chronologically in the order of their original publication.
Franz Kafka (1883-1983): His Craft and Thought by
The eight papers in this volume were originally presented at the centennial conference on Franz Kafka held at the University of Calgary in October 1983. As diverse in approach and methodology as these papers are the general drift of the volume is away from Germanistik towards state-of-the-art methods. The opening articles by Charles Bernheimer and James Rolleston both deal with the similarities and contrasts between Kafka and Flaubert, with Bernheimer focusing on the I and the dilemma of narration in Kafkas early story, Wedding Preparation in the Country, and Rolleston on the time-dimensions in the Kafkas work that link him to the Romantics. Other articles in the volume deal with the complex interrelationships between author and narrator, and implied author and implied reader; with Kafkas place in the European fable tradition and in classic and Romantic religious traditions; with Kafkas diaries; and with his female protagonists.
Franz Kafka: A Study of the Short Fiction by
This is the only series to provide in-depth critical introductions to major modern and contemporary short story writers worldwide. Each volume offers: -- A comprehensive overview of the artist's short fiction -- including detailed analyses of every significant story -- Interviews, essays, memoirs and other biographical materials -- often previously unpublished -- A representative selection of critical responses -- A comprehensive primary bibliography, a selected bibliography of important criticism, a chronology of the artist's life and works and an index
Franz Kafka: Narration, Rhetoric, and Reading by
Franz Kafka: Narration, Rhetoric, and Reading presents essays by noted Kafka critics and by leading narratologists who explore Kafka's original and innovative uses of narrative throughout his career. Collectively, these essays by Stanley Corngold, Anniken Greve, Gerhard Kurz, Jakob Lothe, J. Hillis Miller, Gerhard Neumann, James Phelan, Beatrice Sandberg, Ronald Speirs, and Benno Wagner examine a number of provocative questions that arise in narration and narratives in Kafka's fiction. The arguments of the essays relate both to the peculiarities of Kafka's story-telling and to general issues in narrative theory. They reflect, for example, the complexity of the issues surrounding the "somebody" doing the telling, the attitude of the narrator to what is told, the perceived purpose(s) of the telling, the implied or actual reader, the progression of events, and the progression of the telling. As the essays also demonstrate, Kafka's narratives still present a considerable challenge to, as well as a great resource for, narrative theory and analysis.
Franz Kafka: Subversive Dreamer by
Franz Kafka: Subversive Dreamer is an attempt to identify and properly contextualize the social critique in Kafka's biography and work that links father-son antagonisms, heterodox Jewish religious thinking, and anti-authoritarian or anarchist protest against the rising power of bureaucratic modernity. The book proceeds chronologically, starting with biographical facts often neglected or denied relating to Kafka's relations with the Anarchist circles in Prague, followed by an analysis of the three great unfinished novels--Amerika, The Trial, The Castle--as well as some of his most important short stories. Fragments, parables, correspondence, and his diaries are also used in order to better understand the major literary works. Löwy's book grapples with the critical and subversive dimension of Kafka's writings, which is often hidden or masked by the fabulistic character of the work. Löwy's reading has already generated controversy because of its distance from the usual canon of literary criticism about the Prague writer, but the book has been well received in its original French edition and has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, and Turkish.
Freedom from the Free Will: On Kafka's Laughter by 
From Freud to Kafka: The Paradoxical Foundation of the Life-and-Death Instinct by
This book takes the reader on a captivating journey leading from an erroneous founding assumption inherited from Freud, to the proposal of a principle better suited to allowing the psychoanalyst to accompany the patient out of his impasse. The founding assumption of the book, already questioned by many analysts among whom Sandor Ferenczi figures as a brilliant forerunner, was the author's starting point in re-examining the basic precepts of psychoanalysis.Reading Kafka made the author conclude that this masterful storyteller describes borderline situations, so familiar to him, better than anyone. An avid reader of Freud, Kafka suggests that the human capacity to bear a paradoxical position between life and death is not given to the child naturally, at birth. Kafka seems to say that giving life is easy, but that giving it the necessary support in the form of the trace of death is more problematic. Moreover, when the child is deprived of this trace, he faces the void and, in a panic, must use emergency measures to construct a substitute for the necessary trace of death; and he can only do so by sacrificing his sexuality, his ability to feel, his initiative or his judgement. When the conditions necessary for primal repression are not provided to the child by others, he creates them himself at great cost. What he gives himself is not life, but life-death, and he pays the price for doing so. When primal repression is destroyed - something which can happen at any age - we speak of "soul murder." At the very instant when it occurs, a new Subject comes into existence, a Subject who pushes back the threat of destruction. The new Subject constructs otherness out of an object or out of a part of himself, a part he sacrifices in order to recover the primal repression destroyed by the trauma.This book will interest not only psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, philosophers and students of literature, but also a wide range of readers with a passion for the complexities of the human soul.
Introducing Kafka by
'Introducing Kafka' shows that, alienated from his roots, his family, his surroundings and primarily from his own body, Kafka created a unique literary language in which to hide away, transforming himself into a cockroach, an ape, a dog and a mole.
Kafka's Creatures: Animals, Hybrids, and other Fantastic Beings by
There are few literary authors in whose work animals and other creatures play as prominent a role as they do in Franz Kafka's. Exploring multiple dimensions of Kafka's incorporation of nonhuman creatures into his writing, this volume is the first collection in English of essays devoted to illuminating this important and ubiquitous dimension of his work. The chapters here are written by an array of international scholars from various fields, and represent a diversity of interpretive approaches. In the course of exploring the roles played by nonhuman animals and other creatures in Kafka's writing, they help make sense of the literary and philosophical significance of his preoccupation with animals, and make clear that careful investigation of those creatures illuminates his core concerns: the nature of power; the inescapability of history and guilt; the dangers, promise, and strangeness of the alienation endemic to modern life; the human propensity for cruelty and oppression; the limits and conditions of humanity and the risks of dehumanization; the nature of authenticity; family life; Jewishness; and the nature of language and art. Thus the essays in this volume enrich our understanding of Kafka's work as a whole. Especially striking is the extent to which the articles collected here bring into focus the ways in which Kafka anticipated many of the recent developments in contemporary thinking about nonhuman animals.
Kafka's Social Discourse: An Aesthetic Search for Community by
Franz Kafka is among the most significant 20th century voices to examine the absurdity and terror posed for the individual by what his contemporary Max Weber termed 'the iron cage' of society. Ferdinand Tsnnies had defined the problem of finding community within society for Kafka and his peers in his 1887 book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Kafka took up this issue by focusing upon the 'social discourse' of human relationships. In this book, Mark E. Blum examines Kafka's three novels, Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle in their exploration of how community is formed or eroded in the interpersonal relations of its protagonists. Critical literature has recognized Kafka's ability to narrate the gestural moment of alienation or communion. This 'social discourse' was augmented, however, by a dimension virtually no commentator has recognized-Kafka's conversation with past and present authors. Kafka encoded authors and their texts representing every century of the evolution of modernism and its societal problems, from Bunyan and DeFoe, through Pope and Lessing, to Fontane and Thomas Mann. The inter-textual conversation Kafka conducted can enable us to appreciate the profound human problem of realizing community within society. Cultural historians as well as literary critics will be enriched by the evidence of these encoded cultural conversations. Kafka's 'Imperial Messenger' may finally be heard in the full history of his emanations. Kafka encoded not only past authors, but painters as well. Kafka had been known as a graphic artist in his youth, and was informed by expressionism and cubism as he matured. Kafka's encodings of literature as well as fine art are not solely of the work to which he refers, but the community of authors or painters and their success or failure of community. Kafka's encodings were meant as an extra-textual readings for astute readers, but also as a lesson to his fellow authors whom he held accountable in his correspondence as cultural messengers. Encoding had been a Germanic literary norm since the sixteenth century. Many of Kafka's encodings are of Austrian satirists since the eighteenth century, among them Franz Christoph von Scheyb and Gottlieb Wilhelm Rabener, Josef Schreyvogel, as well as the genial irony of Franz Grillparzer. Austrian literature is prominent, but Kafka's encodings are drawn from all Western literature from Plato through his own present. In The Castle the figure of Momus becomes a major index in the history of Western literature, extended from Plato through Lucian, to Nicolaus Gerbel through Goethe. Momus, the arch-critic of manners, morals, and judge of human character, enables a Kafka reader to use this thread to comprehend the errors of commission and omission in the social discourse of his protagonists throughout his opus.
Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond by
This volume contains the lectures delivered at an international conference in Israel devoted to the topic of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Zionism. Kafka's interests in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Jewish Nationalism and his various relationships to his Zionist friends and his participation in Jewish national and Zionist-related activity are explored from a number of different critical vantage points. Likewise, his writings are considered within the specific framework of Jewish nationalism and Zionism.
Kafka: a Guide for the Perplexed by
Franz Kafka is one of the most widely taught, and read writers in world literature. Readers encountering texts like 'The Metamorphosis' and The Trial for the first time are frequently perplexed by his often intentionally weird writing. Some might say that Kafka's enduring achievement has been to make his readers love being perplexed. As much of Kafka's writing is designed to perplex the reader, this guide helps the reader understand why and how perplexity has been deliberately created by Kafka's text and to realize what the uses of such perplexity might be. The book guides readers through their first encounters with Kafka and introduces the problems involved in reading his texts, the nature of his texts from the key novels and novellas to letters and professional writings, his life as a writer and different approaches to reading Kafka.
Kafka: A Life in Prague by
More than eight decades after his death, the works of Franz Kafka continue to intrigue and haunt us. Even for those with only a fleeting acquaintance with his unfinished novels, or his stories, diaries and letters, "Kafkaesque" has become a byword for the menacing, unfathomable absurdity of modern existence. Yet for all the universal significance of his fiction, Kafka's writing remains inextricably bound up with his life and work in the Czech capital Prague, where he spent every one of his 40 years. Klaus Wagenbach's biography provides a meticulously researched insight into the author's family background, his education and employment, his attitude to his native city, his literary influences, and his relationships with women. The result is a fascinating portrait of the 20th century's most enigmatic writer, in whose works, as W. G. Sebald recognised, "literary and life experience overlap."
Kafka: A Very Short Introduction by
'When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect ...' So begins Franz Kafka's most famous story Metamorphosis.Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is among the most intriguing and influential writers of the twentieth century. During his lifetime he worked as a civil servant and published only a handful of short stories, the best known being The Transformation. All three of his novels, The Trial, The Castle, and The ManWho Disappeared [America], were published after his death and helped to found Kafka's reputation as a uniquely perceptive interpreter of the twentieth century.Kafka's fiction vividly evokes bizarre situations: a commercial traveller is turned into an insect, a banker is arrested by a mysterious court, a fasting artist starves to death in the name of art, a singing mouse becomes the heroine of her nation. Attending both to Kafka's crisis-ridden life and tothe subtleties of his art, Ritchie Robertson shows how his work explores such characteristically modern themes as the place of the body in culture, the power of institutions over people, and the possibility of religion after Nietzsche had proclaimed 'the death of God'. The result is an up-to-dateand accessible portrait of a fascinating author which shows us ways to read and make sense of his perplexing and absorbing work.
Kafka: The Torment of Man by
This is a study of Kafka's tragic vision of life, his profoundly disturbing awareness of man's utter loneliness in a pitiless universe, and his artistry in effecting a strange intimate fusion between symbolism and realism--between anguished poetic narration and the terrifying reality of an absurd and ambiguous environment. The book discusses the historical setting, the literary currents, and the personal details affecting the development of Kafka's genius: his isolation in a labyrinthine universe; his sufferings, sickness and death; his influence and survival through his art. The central idea of the book is summed up in a quotation from Jean-Paul Sartre: "I have nothing to say about Kafka except that he is one of the rarest and greatest writers of our time." The authors are specialists in contemporary literature. Translated from the French by Wade Baskin.
Kafka and Photography by
Throughout his life, Franz Kafka was fascinated by photography, a medium which for him came to encapsulate both the attractions and the pitfalls of modern life. Kafka's personal engagement with the medium - as a keen viewer and collector of photographs as well as an amateur photographer - is reflected in his writings, which explore photography from a variety of different perspectives By far the most frequently and extensively discussed visual medium in Kafka's texts,photography is paradigmatic of his relationship to visuality more generally. This study not only explores photography's recurrence as a theme within his texts but it is also the first to take systematic account of Kafka's use of photographs as literary source material.Kafka and Photography presents one of the most important modern writers from an entirely new perspective; it sheds new light on familiar works and uncovers unexplored aspects of Kafka's engagement with his time and context. Providing a chronological account of key prose works, as well as the personal writings, this study is accessible to students and lay readers. It will be of interest not only to literary scholars but also to those working in photography, media, and cultural studies.Its detailed textual analyses are set against a richly documented historical context which illustrates Kafka's interest in contemporary culture through a range of visual material taken from public as well as private sources - some of which has only recently become available. As this book demonstrates,photography had a profound impact on Kafka's literary imagination and as such helps to explain the mesmerizing intensity of enigmatic visual detail which is a hallmark of his narratives.
Kafka and the Universal by
Kafka's work has been attributed a universal significance and is often regarded as the ultimate witness of the human condition in the twentieth century. Yet his work is also considered paradigmatic for the expression of the singular that cannot be subsumed under any generalization. This paradox engenders questions not only concerning the meaning of the universal as it manifests itself in (and is transformed by) Kafka's writings but also about the expression of the singular in literary fiction as it challenges the opposition between the universal and the singular. The contributions in this volume approach these questions from a variety of perspectives. They are structured according to the following issues: ambiguity as a tool of deconstructing the pre-established philosophical meanings of the universal; the concept of the law as a major symbol for the universal meaning of Kafka's writings; the presence of animals in Kafka's texts; the modernist mode of writing as challenge of philosophical concepts of the universal; and the meaning and relevance of the universal in contemporary Kafka reception. This volume examines central aspects of the interplay between philosophy and literature.
Kafka Translated: How Translators have Shaped our Reading of Kafka by
Kafka Translated is the first book-length publication to look at the issue of translation and Kafka's work. What effect do these translations have on how we read Kafka? Are our interpretations of Kafka influenced by the translators' interpretations? In what ways has Kafka been 'translated' into Anglo-American culture by popular culture and by academics? Woods focuses on issues central to the burgeoning field of Translation Studies- the notion of cultural untranslatability; the centrality of female translators in literary history; and the under-representation of the influence of the translator as interpreter of literary texts. The book specifically focuses on the role of two of Kafka's first translators, Milena Jesensk and Willa Muir, both women, and how this might allow us to reassess reading Kafka. From here Woods opens up the whole process of translation and re-examines accepted and prevailing interpretations of Kafka's work.
Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka by
On the night of September 22, 1912, Franz Kafka wrote his story "The Judgment," which came out of him "like a regular birth." This act of creation struck him as an unmistakable sign of his literary destiny. Thereafter, the search of many of his characters for the Law, for a home, for artistic fulfillment can be understood as a figure for Kafka's own search to reproduce the ecstasy of a single night. In Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, the preeminent American critic and translator of Franz Kafka traces the implications of Kafka's literary breakthrough. Kafka's first concern was not his responsibility to his culture but to his fate as literature, which he pursued by exploring "the limits of the human." At the same time, he kept his transcendental longings sober by noting--with incomparable irony--their virtual impossibility. At times Kafka's passion for personal transcendence as a writer entered into a torturous and witty conflict with his desire for another sort of transcendence, one driven by a modern Gnosticism. This struggle prompted him continually to scrutinize different kinds of mediation, such as confessional writing, the dream, the media, the idea of marriage, skepticism, asceticism, and the imitation of death. Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka concludes with a reconstruction and critique of the approaches to Kafka by such major critics as Adorno, Gilman, and Deleuze and Guattari..
The Metamorphosis by
The novella is fully annotated and is accompanied by selected textual variants. Backgrounds and Contexts introduces readers to The Metamorphosis in the richest possible setting. The links between the author's life and his work are explored through an examination of his personal writings. Kafka's letters and diary entries illuminate the creative process behind his portrait of Gregor Samsa, his family, and their nightmarish ordeal. Criticism collects seven essays from the period 1970-95 representing the most important currents in literary theory--semiotics, feminism, identity philosophy, New Historicism, and post-Freudian cultural psychoanalysis. The essays offer a variety of perspectives on the novella by Iris Bruce, Nina Pelikan Straus, Kevin W. Sweeney, Mark Anderson, Hartmut Binder, Eric Santner, and Stanley Corngold. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka by
A comprehensive and interpretative biography of Franz Kafka that is both a monumental work of scholarship and a vivid, lively evocation of Kafka's world.
Philosophy and Kafka by
The relationship of philosophy with Kafka's oeuvre is complex. It has been argued that Kafka's novels and stories defy philosophic extrapolation; conversely, it has also been suggested that precisely the tendency of Kafka's writings to elude discursive solution is itself a philosophical tendency, one that is somehow contributing to a wiser relationship of human beings with language. These matters are the focus of the proposed volume on Philosophy and Kafka. The proposed collection brings together essays that interrogate the relationship of philosophy and Kafka, and offer new and original interpretations. The volume obviously cannot claim completeness, but it partially does justice to the multiplicity of philosophical issues and philosophical interpretations at stake. This variety informs the composition of the volume itself. A number of essays focus on specific philosophical commentaries on Kafka's work, from Adorno's to Agamben's, from Arendt's to Benjamin's, from Deleuze and Guattari's to Derrida's. A number of essays consider the possible relevance of certain philosophical outlooks for examining Kafka's writings: here Kafka's name goes alongside those of Socrates, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Buber, Heidegger, Blanchot, and Levinas. Finally, a number of essays consider Kafka's writings in terms of a specific philosophical theme, such as communication and subjectivity, language and meaning, knowledge and truth, the human/animal divide, justice, and freedom. In all contributions to the volume, such themes, motifs, and interpretations arise. To varying degrees, all essays are concerned with the relationship of literature and philosophy, and thus with the philosophical significance of Kafka's writings.
Prague Territories : National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin De Siècle by
Scott Spector's adventurous cultural history maps for the first time the "territories" carved out by German-Jewish intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the twentieth century. Spector explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished, revealing previously unseen relationships between politics and culture. His incisive readings of a broad array of German writers feature the work of Kafka and the so-called "Prague circle" and encompass journalism, political theory, Zionism, and translation as well as literary program and practice. With the collapse of German-liberal cultural and political power in the late-nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire, Prague's bourgeois Jews found themselves squeezed between a growing Czech national movement on the one hand and a racial rather than cultural conception of Germanness on the other. Displaced from the central social and cultural position they had come to occupy, the members of the "postliberal" Kafka generation were dazzlingly productive and original, far out of proportion to their numbers. Seeking a relationship between ideological crisis and cultural innovation, Spector observes the emergence of new forms of territoriality. He identifies three fundamental areas of cultural inventiveness related to this Prague circle's political and cultural dilemma. One was Expressionism, a revolt against all limits and boundaries, the second was a spiritual form of Zionism incorporating a novel approach to Jewish identity that seems to have been at odds with the pragmatic establishment of a Jewish state, and the third was a sort of cultural no-man's-land in which translation and mediation took the place of "territory." Spector's investigation of these areas shows that the intensely particular, idiosyncratic experience of German-speaking Jews in Prague allows access to much broader and more general conditions of modernity. Combining theoretical sophistication with a refreshingly original and readable style, Prague Territories illuminates some early signs of a contemporary crisis from which we have not yet emerged.
Transforming Kafka: Translation Effects by
Patrick O'Neill approaches five of Kafka's novels and short stories by considering the many translations of each work as a single, multilingual "macrotext."
