A Companion to the works of Franz Kafka

Abstract

Rolleston, James, ed. A Companion to Works of Franz Kafka. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002. 372 pp. $75.00 hardcover. A concluding remark in clayton Koelb's preliminary piece in A Companion Guide to Works of Franz Kafka becomes quickly emblematic of project undertaken by this ambitious and masterful collection. He writes, indicating less resignation than a resounding charge to take on Kafka's ambiguities without resolving them, there are just too many Kafkas to be encompassed in a single editorial perspective. The 'real' Franz Kafka is never going to stand up (31). Indeed, he will not, but it is precisely both this elusiveness and vague hope that he might reveal something of himself that animates unique attempt of this collection to encourage reader simultaneously to seek a decisive understanding of Kafka and to delight in her not being able to do so. For its vehement adherence to both/and that marks Kafka's work to core, this collection is necessary for any student of Kafka. The voices represented here, from seasoned and highly respected to newly emerging, speak to wide methodological range that typifies Kafka studies. In his introduction, James Rolleston suggests that these essays are unified in that they are representative of definitive turn in Kafka studies; they perform, in other words, inversion of modernist purification of language by means of a reactivation of biographical dimension [Kafka] had so rigorously excluded. Such an approach, he cautions, should not be taken as evidence of a positivism (1-2). Rather, he suggests, this biographical dimension is grafted onto Benjamin's seminal modernist reading of Kafka's work. The resulting essays collectively acknowledge nuanced and precarious task of locating Kafka simultaneously within and outside a historical moment, and, largely, achieve seamless melding of aesthetic with the real, those two poles Kafka longed to collapse into one, though such a collapse continued to elude him. As instructive as they are multiple in their approaches and concerns, these essays confirm Rolleston's contention that ... we are now in a very productive era of Kafka scholarship (15). The first pieces, by Rolleston and Koelb, provide a helpful point of entry for new initiate of Kafka, as they briefly introduce 1994 Paperback Critical Edition of Kafka's works (Fischer Verlag) and categorize available works of Kafka according to those published during his lifetime and those published posthumously. …