Kafka in the Classroom: What We Learn from Roth's Teaching Notes

Abstract

Abstract: Roth's personal copy of Kafka's short-story collection, The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces (1948), contains significant marginalia compiled over multiple readings that appear to be his teaching notes. By examining these notes, visitors to the Philip Roth Personal Library have the opportunity to imagine Roth-the-writer with his reading and teaching practices. While many scholars recognize Kafka's influence on Roth's earlier works, this essay connects Roth's teaching notes on Kafka's short story "In the Penal Colony" (1914) to The Human Stain (2000) and Indignation (2008), two novels that take place in college settings and focus on institutional sadism and Arendt's concept of the banality of evil. In Kafka, Roth found a model for articulating distrust in institutions of higher learning, and he uses this model to suggest that these institutions are a spectacle of normalized identity abuse. If the penal colony is an allegory for an institutional orgy of sadism closer to home than Prague, or any number of the Communist countries Roth mentions in The Human Stain and Indignation , that institution might be the twenty-first-century university.