Performing the Negative: Kafka and the Origins of Late Modernism

Abstract

Franz Kafka's response to late nineteenth-century language scepticism sets his work apart from the high modernism of the 1920s. Rather than seeking to achieve linguistic renewal in the manner of Joyce, Proust, or Pound, Kafka increasingly commits himself to forms of linguistic negativism that anticipate post-Second World War late modernist attempts to produce what Samuel Beckett describes as a ‘Literatur des Unworts’. This article charts the development of Kafka's linguistic negativism between 1904 and 1924, and seeks to identify the principal ways in which his ‘unwording’ was crucial for the emergence of European late modernism from Beckett to Sebald.