Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka
Author: Jakob Lothe
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Narration (Rhetoric)
ISBN: 9780814211502

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.

Kafka's Zoopoetics

Kafka's Zoopoetics
Author: Naama Harel
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2020-04-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0472126512

Nonhuman figures are ubiquitous in the work of Franz Kafka, from his early stories down to his very last one. Despite their prominence throughout his oeuvre, Kafka’s animal representations have been considered first and foremost as mere allegories of intrahuman matters. In recent years, the allegorization of Kafka’s animals has been poetically dismissed by Kafka’s commentators and politically rejected by posthumanist scholars. Such critique, however, has yet to inspire either an overarching or an interdiscursive account. This book aims to fill this lacuna. Positing animal stories as a distinct and significant corpus within Kafka’s entire poetics, and closely examining them in dialogue with both literary and posthumanist analysis, Kafka’s Zoopoetics critically revisits animality, interspecies relations, and the very human-animal contradistinction in the writings of Franz Kafka. Kafka’s animals typically stand at the threshold between humanity and animality, fusing together human and nonhuman features. Among his liminal creatures we find a human transformed into vermin (in “The Metamorphosis”), an ape turned into a human being (in “A Report to an Academy”), talking jackals (in “Jackals and Arabs”), a philosophical dog (in “Researches of a Dog”), a contemplative mole-like creature (in “The Burrow”), and indiscernible beings (in “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People”). Depicting species boundaries as mutable and obscure, Kafka creates a fluid human-animal space, which can be described as “humanimal.” The constitution of a humanimal space radically undermines the stark barrier between human and other animals, dictated by the anthropocentric paradigm. Through denying animalistic elements in humans, and disavowing the agency of nonhuman animals, excluding them from social life, and neutralizing compassion for them, this barrier has been designed to regularize both humanity and animality. The contextualization of Kafka's animals within posthumanist theory engenders a post-anthropocentric arena, which is simultaneously both imagined and very real.

Kafka's Narrative Theater

Kafka's Narrative Theater
Author: James Rolleston
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 166
Release: 1990-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0271072814

Can one speak of Kafka's heroes as "characters"? If so, why is it so hard to define their characteristics? If not, how is the reader persuaded to accompany them on their existential journeys, accepting their behavior as falling within the realm of human logic? This study argues that Kafka's fiction has two conflicting premises: the subjective impossibility of human existence, foreclosing all hope of "meaning" in individual actions; and the ordered structure of human thoughts which assign meaning to the smallest event and analyze endlessly the behavior of other people. Kafka's characters are always, either potentially or actually, moving in both directions at once, earnestly building up a continuous logic to their actions while skeptically dismantling their own pretensions to existence. The device of the circumscribed narrator, congruent with the hero, knowing only what the hero knows, yet not identical with him, enables Kafka to contain both fundamental tendencies in a single sentence. Although Kafka is widely read, his works seem to give rise very easily to misconceptions; this study is designed primarily to facilitate an intelligent reading of Kafka. Without imposing answers of its own, it seeks to foster an awareness of the problems of perspective and presentation which Kafka engages.

Kafka on the Shore

Kafka on the Shore
Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2006-01-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1400079276

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the New York Times bestselling author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and one of the world’s greatest storytellers comes "an insistently metaphysical mind-bender” (The New Yorker) about a teenager on the run and an aging simpleton. Now with a new introduction by the author. Here we meet 15-year-old runaway Kafka Tamura and the elderly Nakata, who is drawn to Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, acclaimed author Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder, in what is a truly remarkable journey. “As powerful as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.... Reading Murakami ... is a striking experience in consciousness expansion.” —The Chicago Tribune

Understanding Franz Kafka

Understanding Franz Kafka
Author: Allen Thiher
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2018-01-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611178290

An analysis of the life of the eccentric author of The Trial, and his quest for meaning in his work. Franz Kafka is without question one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century despite the fact that much of his work remained unpublished when he died at a relatively young age in 1924. Kafka’s eccentric methods of composition and his diffident attitude toward publishing left most of his writing to be edited and published after his death by his literary executor, Max Brod. In Understanding Franz Kafka, Allen Thiher addresses the development of Kafka’s work by analyzing it in terms of its chronological unfolding, emphasizing the various phases in Kafka’s life that can be discerned in his constant quest to find a meaning for his writing. Thiher also shows that Kafka’s work, frequently self-referential, explores the ways literature can have meaning in a world in which writing is a dubious activity. After outlining Kafka’s life using new biographical information, Thiher examines Kafka’s first attempts at writing, often involving nearly farcical experiments. The study then shows how Kafka’s work developed through twists and turns, beginning with the breakthrough stories “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis,” continuing with his first attempt at a novel with Amerika, and followed by Kafka’s shifting back and forth between short fiction and two other unpublished novels, The Trial and The Castle. Thiher also calls on Kafka’s notebooks and diaries to help demonstrate that he never stopped experimenting in his attempt to find a literary form that might satisfy his desire to create some kind of transcendental text in an era in which the transcendent is at best an object of nostalgia or of comic derision. In short, Thiher contends, Kafka constantly sought the grounds for writing in a world in which all appears groundless.

Franz Kafka's the Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka's the Metamorphosis
Author: Sterling Professor of Humanities Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2009
Genre: Criticism
ISBN: 1438114028

Presents a collection of critical essays about Kafka's The metamorphosis.

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka
Author: Stanley Corngold
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501722824

In Stanley Corngold’s view, the themes and strategies of Kafka’s fiction are generated by a tension between his concern for writing and his growing sense of its arbitrary character. Analyzing Kafka’s work in light of "the necessity of form," which is also a merely formal necessity, Corngold uncovers the fundamental paradox of Kafka’s art and life. The first section of the book shows how Kafka’s rhetoric may be understood as the daring project of a man compelled to live his life as literature. In the central part of the book, Corngold reflects on the place of Kafka within the modern tradition, discussing such influential precursors of Cervantes, Flaubert, and Nietzsche, whose works display a comparable narrative disruption. Kafka’s distinctive narrative strategies, Corngold points out, demand interpretation at the same time they resist it. Critics of Kafka, he says, must be aware that their approaches are guided by the principles that Kafka’s fiction identifies, dramatizes, and rejects.

The Limits of Voice

The Limits of Voice
Author: Luiz Costa Lima
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1996
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780804725408

The title of this work derives from Costa-Lima's reading of what is probably the most famous passage in Kant's Third Critique. In Kant's thesis that the results of aesthetic judgment are "generally communicable but without the mediation of a concept," Costa-Lima discovers the necessity to identify and underscore a silence. This silence - these "limits of voice" - becomes the complex metonymy for the central theme of this book, literary experience as a case of aesthetic experience. In pursuing this theme, Costa-Lima views aesthetic and literary experience as a historically limited potentiality and examines the limits of aesthetic experience, which comes from its dependence on contextual requirements. The concern about "limits of voice" is developed on three different levels. First, Costa-Lima focuses, as a historical and systematic condition for aesthetic and literary experience, on subjectivity as the subject's right to speak in his/her own name. Second, he argues that, although historical modes of speaking and experiencing were inscribed into and legitimized by cosmological constructions, subjectivity requires the existence of a context no longer grounded in cosmology, which he refers to as "the Law." Third, he postulates the double dependence of literary and aesthetic experience on the emergence of subjectivity and the existence of "the Law" as its enabling and limiting frame condition. This book answers a challenge that has persisted in literary theory and literary history for almost two decades - how to historicize the concept of literature.

Two novels

Two novels
Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher:
Total Pages: 695
Release: 2006
Genre:
ISBN: 9780099507079

Two of Murakami's early novels are brought together. Dark, dry and downright weird, 'A Wild Sheep Chase' is the story of a man, a girl, her ears and a very special sheep. 'Dance Dance Dance' is part murder-mystery, part metaphysical speculation.

Kafka's Creatures

Kafka's Creatures
Author: Marc Lucht
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2010-06-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0739143964

Kafka's Creatures: Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings is an interdisciplinary collection of essays on Franz Kafka's use of non-human creatures in his writings. It is written from a variety of interpretive perspectives and highlights diverse ways of understanding how Kafka's use of these creatures illuminate his work in general.