Kafka und die kleine Prosa der Moderne ed. by Manfred Engel and Ritchie Robertson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kafka und die kleine Prosa der Moderne ed. by Manfred Engel and Ritchie Robertson William Quirk Manfred Engel and Ritchie Robertson, eds., Kafka und die kleine Prosa der Moderne. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2010. 300 pp. In what ways does short form matter in Kafka? The aphorism, the parable, the fragment, the story-as-fragment, the self-conscious, literary letter: How [End Page 157] should a consideration of these and other short prose genres affect the interpretation of Kafka’s work? This is the line of questioning that anchors Kafk a und die kleine Prosa der Moderne, edited by Manfred Engel and Ritchie Robertson, which offers a stimulating contribution to recent Kafk a scholarship. The product of a conference held by the Oxford Kafka Research Centre at St. John’s College, Oxford, in 2008, the volume presents an array of perspectives, in both German and English, on the question of Kafka’s relation to the short modernist prose of the early twentieth century. The collection includes contributions from major Kafka scholars, including Robertson, Gerhard Neumann, and Stanley Corngold, as well as experts in adjacent fields who bring their unique perspectives to Kafk a studies. By far the most impressive and useful aspect of the book is the overall contextualization it accomplishes. In one of the two essays in the volume’s introductory section (“Vorüberlegungen”), Dirk Göttsche situates Kafk a’s work in the development of different short prose forms around 1900 and accentuates how a “Minimalisierung des Erzählens” allows Kafka to explore new possibilities of writing. Göttsche’s focus on form is complemented nicely by Rüdiger Zymner’s introductory essay, which outlines Kafk a’s particular type of Innenwelt at a time when other writers were exploring the nuances of consciousness and its expressability on the page. These two essays provide a helpful backdrop for the series of readings that plays out in the volume. The middle section of the volume contains interpretations focused exclusively on Kafka’s works. First is Gerhard Neumann’s essay, which uses Kafka’s manuscripts to offer an in-depth textual autopsy of the development, in roughly three stages (aphorism, anecdote, parable), of the piece titled “Ein Leben.” In an essay with comparable attention to textual detail, Ritchie Robertson analyzes Kafka’s use of the pronouns “ich” and “wir” in different texts and underscores thereby the undermining effect that these pronouns can have. Neumann and Robertson are outstanding scholars, and while both of their essays present interesting, cogent arguments, neither of their respective theses has the ambition that one might have hoped to see from these Kafk a experts. There are three other contributions in this section of the book: Carolin Duttlinger uses recent theoretical work on the question of attention and distraction to examine Kafka’s work from “Betrachtung” to “Der Bau”; Manfred Engel undertakes a close analysis of “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” as “fantastic narration”; and Julian Preece brings Kafk a’s letters to Felice into the discussion about short prose. Duttlinger’s essay pairs up nicely with the contribution [End Page 158] of Anna Fuchs later in the volume. Both Fuchs and Duttlinger investigate questions of attention and distraction, and their interpretations, taking Jonathan Crary’s work on perception in the nineteenth century as one of their starting points, offer a promising new angle from which to view Kafka, both in short prose and beyond. Göttsche’s and Zymner’s preparatory “Vorüberlegungen” have much in common with the collection’s third and most substantial section, which examines Kafka in the company of his various contemporaries. Especially noteworthy here are essays by Moritz Baßler and Andreas Kramer, who both address Kafka’s relation to Expressionism. Critical of how so much of Kafka scholarship disregards Kafka’s Expressionist context, Baßler’s essay is the more provocative one, offering the novel concept of “Routine” to organize his consideration of Expressionist styles. A fine contribution here also comes from Stanley Corngold, whose essay on “aphoristic form” in Kafka and Nietzsche give us the most “performative” or self-conscious act of interpretation in the volume. The essay is smart and nimble: It maneuvers through and...