Lost in Kafka’s America

Journal of Austrian Studies, 2013

Social Science Research Network, 2017

This article presents an alternative reading of Franz Kafka's novella THE TRIAL informed by biographical insights and supported through textual analysis and a psychological theoretical framework. The protagonist, Josef K, is portrayed as a modern humanist Everyman animated by self-interested instrumental rationality whose way of life is confronted by the court of common humanity. K rebuffs all opportunities presented to him for entering sincere and genuine human relationships with the result that he forfeits his own humanity. THE TRIAL thus embodies a relational perspective on society by emphasizing the role of shared meaning as central to a worthy life and spiritual fulfilment. Kafka challenges readers to engage deeply with the text and through it, the author. This reading of THE TRIAL contributes to our understanding and appreciation of communitarian ethics and relational justice.

This paper discusses the short story The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka. it is my contention in this essay that this story , like all of Kafka’s oeuvre portrays a nightmare world that witnesses the failure of unashamed and unabashed innocence and the triumph of negative experience, expressed essentially in unresolved and unpardoned guilt. In many ways Kafka's predilection for the nightmarish world of experience is a prefigurement of the forthcoming Holocaust that was to be unleashed upon the unsuspecting world by Hitler and his evil henchmen only some fifteen years after the author’s death. That much of this author's work is bleak and dark in the extreme is perhaps understandable, but with Hoffman we must make the effort to see that this work can be seen as surreal and funny at the same time. Sometimes, that task is hard given that Kafka's humour is so black.

2017

This paper applies analytical philosophical and rhetorical linguistic, or tropological, methods to Kafka's two main novels, The Castle and The Trial. The main tropes discussed and applied are metaphor, metonymy, and ambiguity in addition to some references to irony. The main background presupposition is that Kafka's text does not allow for consensual interpretation. Any reader may read the text as he or she likes. Instead of trying to formulate my own interpretation I adopt a tropological method. I try to show how especially ambiguity structures the text and guides the movement of its material content to form new images and meanings. This is not so much a new interpretation of Kafka's novels but a methodologically guided attempt to show how they can be studied without a commitment to a given interpretation.

Vagaries of Desire: A Collection of Philosophical Essays, 2019

Vagaries of Desire is a major collection of new essays by Timo Airaksinen on the philosophy of desire. The first part develops a novel account of the philosophical theory of desire, including Girard. The second part discusses Kafka's main works, namely The Castle, The Trial, and Amerika, and Thomas Hobbes and the problems of intentionality. The text develops such linguistic tropes as metaphor and metonymy in connection with topics like death and then applies them to Kafka's texts. The third part makes an effort to understand the mysteries of sadism and masochism in philosophical and rhetorical terms. The last article criticizes Thomas Nagel's influential account of sexual perversion and develops a viable alternative"--Provided by publisher.

MATERIALI DI ESTETICA. TERZA SERIE N. 4.2 2017, 2017

This is the first translation of Brod’s text which was originally published on the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” on 22.10.1965. This edition, compared with the one in “The Prague Circle” (1966), also presents a new translation of Kafka’s only known aesthetical fragment of 1906 upon the experience of beauty and novelty, two elements which play a salient role in the whole of his narrative. Brod’s suggestions as well as Kafka’s counterarguments encompass the process of knowledge thus developing peculiar points of view upon subjectivity and creative processes. German-Jewish Cultural Studies and Philosophy; German Literature; Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism; Intermediality and Intertextuality are here to be reckoned with KEY-WORDS Franz Kafka – Max Brod – Aesthetical Pleasure – Beauty – Novelty - Narratives – “psicologico” instead of “physiologisch” – Representational Processes - Body as Involved in Writing Strategies Aesthetics – Fiction – Creative Processes – Beauty – Novelty – Arguments vs Counterarguments; Intermediality; Intertextuality; Max Brod – Franz Kafka

Arcadia-International Journal for …, 2011

This article focuses on the complexity of sovereign power and its effects on the human body. Kafka's story, In the penal colony, seems to illustrate the relationship between body and power, or, more generally, the relation between human body and the discursive practices listed on it. As a result, in a kind of apocalyptic aesthetics, the human body turns into an object that can be written upon, an object subjected to different types of processing and manipulations, emphasizing the idea that human being is shaped by power from the time of his birth.

2021

Kafka's 'Before the Law' showcases his modernist approach to literature that marks a break from literary Realism. Through analysing the text, the essay would aim at exploring Kafka's rebellion against Realism with regard to the content and form he devises, and his peculiar relationship with language.

Neophilologus, 1993

The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to reread," says Albert Camus in his famous essay on the Absurd (124). Camus attributes this to the ambiguity and symbolic character of Kafka's works, which challenge the reader to adopt a hermeneutic approach, and reread the stories time after time from a new angle, trying to determine their meaning. But this is hardly a complete explanation of the special feeling aroused by Kafka's writing and the strange attraction that draws one again to the same text to repeat a similar Kafkaesque experience. Kafka's works are indeed highly ambiguous and contain dense symbols that constitute an integral part of their universe; and, certainly, "the symbol gives rise to thought" as Ricoeur says (299). It invites interpretation and, so to speak, inspires the hermeneutic reading as a necessary correlative of its symbolic nature. Critics have therefore abundantly analyzed Kafka's text, meticulously probing his imagery, plots, heroes and tortuous thinking, in a consistent attempt to decipher his symbols and suggest some sort of explanatory key-whether a sociological, psychological, mythical or philosophical key in the spirit of the traditional approaches which, over the years, have characterized criticism of the Kafka text, or a self-referential recta-linguistic or recta-poetic key according to the demands of the structuralist and post-structuralistic criticism which began to be published during the seventies. It should be pointed out that side by side with "purist" critics who continue to present traditional unified interpretations, 2 there is a growing new approach of heterogeneous criticism based on methodological pluralism. This recent approach is developing a multi-directional interpretation (sometimes even at the cost of the consistency and coherence of the critical discourse itself) which aims at giving expression to the various levels and areas of significance that, according to these critics, the Kafka text simultaneously directs itself towards. 3 But the attempt to interconnect extremely different interpretations within one line of interpretative argument, sometimes leads the critical text to begin itself to resemble (in the suggestive metaphors which characterize its style and in its patterns of ambiguous images) the symbolic text whose task it is to interpret? Some critics, despairing of translating Kafka's universe into rational modes of thinking, have preferred "to approach the drama through its appearance and the novel through its form" (Camus 124). They warn the reader against the tendency to treat Kafka as an "unsuccessful philosopher in need of someone to explain him" (Magny 163) and suggest a

2017

In recent years, 'writing' has become a keyword in Kafka research. Deconstructivist critics argue that Kafka's primary aim was not the creation of completed works; rather, writing, the continuous transformation of life into Schrift (meaning text or scripture), was for him an aim in itself-and, at the same time, the real and only subject of his texts. 1 Such claims should not remain uncontested. Though writing for Kafka was obviously better than not being able to write, it was definitely no substitute for the production, and indeed the publication, of finished works. Such debates aside, it is clear that Kafka developed a very original and unorthodox way of writing, which in turn had important consequences for the shape of his novels and shorter prose works. This chapter discusses the main features of Kafka's personal version of écriture automatique ('automatic writing'-writing which bypasses conscious control); his techniques for opening a story, continuing the writing flow and closing it; the purpose of his self-corrections; and the consequences that this mode of literary production had for Kafka's novels. Writing in Perfection: 'The Judgement' Kafka was notoriously critical of his own work, but there is one text that even to him appeared faultless: 'Das Urteil' ('The Judgement', 1912). Strangely enough, his main reason for approving of the narration was the way in which it had been written: This story 'The Judgement' I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd-23rd, from ten o'clock at night to six o'clock in the morning. .. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing in water. Several times during this night I carried my own weight on my back. How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again. .. At two I looked at the clock for the last time. As the maid walked through the anteroom for the first time I wrote the last sentence. .. The conviction verified

Journal of Austrian Studies, 2020