Neighbors, Foes and Other Communities: Kafka and Zionism

Undergraduate Research Journal, 2016

This piece examines the role of language in creating the identity of the foreigner in German prose. Writing at opposite ends of the 20th century, Kafka and Tawada serve as harbingers for a broader sense of alienation that comes with writing as an Other. Using lenses provided by Spivak, Butler, Said and Deluze, this essay surveys the broader cultural concepts and theoretical implications of the notion of the metaphorical subaltern that can be created in prose, and the particularities presented by the German language in creating and articulating this identity. This essay examines six texts, three by Kafka and three by Tawada, placing them in contrast with one another. Ultimately this essay seeks to shift the hermeneutics of reading the Kantian Ding an sich of subaltern as hopeless, rather to see the these six texts as a plea for understanding. Writing is born from and deals with the acknowledged doubt of an explicit division, in sum of the impossibility of one’s one place... it remain...

Journal of Austrian Studies, 2013

Franz Kafka and His Prague Contexts: Studies in Language and Literature, 2016

Franz Kafka is by far the Prague author most widely read and admired internationally. However, his reception in Czechoslovakia, launched by the Liblice conference in 1963, has been conflicted. While rescuing Kafka from years of censorship and neglect, Czech critics of the 1960s “overwrote” his German and Jewish literary and cultural contexts in order to focus on his Czech cultural connections. Seeking to rediscover Kafka’s multiple backgrounds, in Franz Kafka and His Prague Contexts Marek Nekula focuses on Kafka’s Jewish social and literary networks in Prague, his German and Czech bilingualism, and his knowledge of Yiddish and Hebrew. Kafka’s bilingualism is discussed in the context of contemporary essentialist views of a writer’s “organic” language and identity. Nekula also pays particular attention to Kafka’s education, examining his studies of Czech language and literature as well as its role in his intellectual life. The book concludes by asking how Kafka “read” his urban environment, looking at the readings of Prague encoded in his fictional and non-fictional texts.

Multiple realities and individual choice in the "Postmodern Bildungsroman": Kafka on the Shore Haruki Murakami"s work of fiction is considered to be the representative of Japanese Postmodern fiction. this paper will consider Kafka on the Shore as the primary text to showcase how this novel is a novel of individual choice. This paper also will try to analyse how this is novel about a personal tale of development in a postmodern world. In this paper I would also like to discuss how parallel and multiple realities are used as a narrative strategy to this "Postmodern Bildungsroman" to push the limits of human subjectivity.