Kafkas Urteil und die Literaturtheorie: Zehn Modellanalysen (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kafkas Urteil und die Literaturtheorie: Zehn Modellanalysen Patrick O'Neill Oliver Jahraus and Stefan Neuhaus, eds. Kafkas Urteil und die Literaturtheorie: Zehn Modellanalysen. Reclams Universal-Bibliothek 17636. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002. 271 pp. Eur 7.10 (Paperback). ISBN 3-15-017636-0. The editors, both faculty members at the Universität Bamberg, acknowledge the similarity of their undertaking to David Wellbery's Positionen der Literaturwissenschaft: Acht Modellanalysen am Beispiel von Kleists 'Das Erdbeben in Chili' (1985), but point also to a central difference. While Wellbery's collection was aimed at literary scholars and theorists, the present volume is intended as a primer, offering a triple introduction: the collection "soll als Einführung in die Methodik der Literaturwissenschaft, als Einführung in die Möglichkeiten der Interpretation eines 'schwierigen' Textes und als Einführung in die Inter-pretation von Kafkas Werk gelesen werden können" (32). The choice of Das Urteil is hardly surprising: Kafka's story occupies fewer than a dozen printed pages and has provoked more than two hundred printed attempts variously to interpret it, explain it, or explain it away. The volume opens with the reprinted text of Das Urteil and gets under way with a briskly efficient introductory chapter by the editors on "Die Methodologie der Literaturwissenschaft und die Kafka-Interpretation," in which they advance the position that theoretical approaches are valuable first and foremost as tools for the interpretation of literary texts. While this is a consciously limited view of the matter, it has an appropriately utilitarian appeal in the pedagogical context, and one can certainly applaud the editorial warning against seeing literary texts merely as vehicles for the demonstration of ever more refined theoretical approaches. This salutary introduction is followed by ten separate chapters focussing on ten different theoretical orientations, namely "Hermeneutik" (Rolf Selbmann), "Strukturalismus" (Michael Scheffel), [End Page 180] "Rezeptionsästhetik" (Stefan Neuhaus), "Sozialgeschichte der Literatur" (Claus-Michael Ort), "Psychoanalytische Literaturinterpretation" (Thomas Anz), "Gender Studies" (Christine Kanz), "Diskursanalyse" (Lothar Bluhm), "Systemtheorie" (Nina Ort), "Intertextualität" (Susanne Schedel), and "Dekonstruktion" (Oliver Jahraus). Each chapter follows a broadly similar strategy, first briefly introducing the chosen theoretical orientation, then suggesting its general relevance to Kafka's writing, and finally examining specific aspects of Das Urteil that achieve special prominence when viewed in the particular light shed by the approach under discussion. Such an organizational strategy could easily become wearying over the course of ten chapters, but happily it does nothing of the sort. Several of the theoretical introductions are minor masterpieces of presentational concision. Nor does the need for brevity lead to a mere mechanical listing of key points, for the presenters do not by any means shy away from interrogating their canonical authorities: in his brief presentation of the essentials of Rezeptionsästhetik, for example, Stefan Neuhaus briskly takes Wolfgang Iser to task for the alleged vagueness of two of his most celebrated concepts, the interpretive Leerstelle and the implied reader. By thus entering immediately into a dialogue with the most authoritative formulations of their particular approach, the introductions have the additional and substantial merit of successfully conveying a sense of the excitement of literary theory, pure or applied, as a discourse permanently under construction and open to debate. Each chapter ends with a concise bibliography of suggested further reading, almost all of it, unsurprisingly for the series, in German or in German translation. The particular selection of theoretical orientations (and their tutelary authority figures, as represented, roughly, by the number of substantive citations) is of interest in itself. The earlier chapters focus on hermeneutics (Schleiermacher, Gadamer, Jauß), structuralist narratology (Genette), and German reader theory (Jauß, Iser); the middle chapters discuss orientations grounded in sociology (Bourdieu, Luhmann), psychoanalysis (Freud rather than Lacan), and gender studies (Judith Butler); the final chapters focus on discourse analysis (Foucault), systems theory (Luhmann), intertextuality (Bakhtin, Kristeva), and deconstruction (Derrida). The reader whose primary interest is in Kafka rather than literary theory will also find much that is stimulating, as in Michael Scheffel's discussion, under the rubric of structuralist narratology, of the fundamental importance of focalization in Das Urteil. Scheffel properly points out, for example (66), that Genette's distinction between narrator and focalizer both obliges and enables the narratological...