Czech Language and Literature

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.

Modern Fiction Studies, 2019

2012

Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language, 2024

The paper focuses on Prague's urban space, architecture, and monuments, and on the meanings and functions that Kafka saw in them, explicitly rejected, or significantly ignored in his literary texts and personal writings, including his diaries and letters.

Proceedings 2002 University of West Bohemia

Past and Present, #156, 1996

Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language traces the writer Franz Kafka’s interest in modern art and visual culture. Examining Kafka’s relationship to visuality, the book explores the diversity of images that surrounded Kafka in his home city of Prague—a heterogeneous and multilingual metropolis whose visual environment shaped his everyday experiences. It maps how Kafka engaged with local painting and sculpture, architecture, and monuments, and also with an array of popular visual media and phenomena from illustrated magazines and advertising to film, photography, dance, and cabaret. Kafka’s attention to the modern visual culture of his era was reflected in his writings and in his interest in drawing, a practice in which he received preliminary training and which he took up in his free time during his years as a university student. The monograph is published on the occasion of the centennial of Kafka's death and in association with the exhibition Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language at the Gallery of West Bohemia in Pilsen (5 June–28 October 2024). It is also available in a Czech edition edited by Marie Rakušanová. The book is available for pre-order in North America through Distributed Art Publishers: https://www.artbook.com/9788074374265.html

2017

Franz Kafka a Prague born writer belonged to a middle-class Jewish family that was financially secure. He grew up during the period when Prague was a provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kafka's father sought acceptance for his family from the German speaking elite of the city and thus admitted Franz to German rather than Czech schools. Nevertheless, the dichotomous relations between the Czech and the German communities were the earliest encounters of Franz with the feelings of alienation. Sin ce Franz was the eldest child and the only surviving son of his parents, he was expected to follow a rigorous schedule in life and rise to success, most of all in material terms. His paths always diverged from the decrees, desires and wishes of his father. It was against the wishes of his father that Franz studied law at German University and earned his doctorate in the subject in 1906, but he could never chart a linear vocational path. He disliked the prospect of a legal career and joined an insurance organization in Prague and worked there from 1908 to 1922. It was at this stage of his life that he suffered from tuberculosis, which debilitated him to the extent that he had to retire from the insurance job in 1922, and spent most the remaining years of hi s life in various sanatoriums, while writing fictional stories and novellas until his death in Kierling, Austria on June 3 rd in 1924. It was in his last will and testament that Kafka requested his friend Max Brod, whom he had selected as his literary facilitator to destroy the manuscripts of his writings, but his request was ignored by Brod, and instead he organized posthumous publication of several of his writings. It is surprising to note that publications of his lifetime were relatively numerous. Betwe en 1907 and 1924, approximately seventy texts appeared in print, excluding obituaries, reviews and non-literary material. They range from newspaper items and stories of varying length in journals to self-contained collections of prose passages and chapters from his novels. The earliest Kafka writing, Description of a Struggle was written in