The Cambridge Companion to Kafka by Julian PreeceA Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka by James Rolleston

Abstract

AUSTRIAN STUDIES, 12, 2OO4 295 including one with a more topical theme interwoven: war. By the end of his life Altenberg claimed to have collected some 10,000 postcards; and 'postcard texts' by him, prose poems fromNeues Altes (1911), had been at the centre of the Vienna School's notorious 'Skandalkonzert' of 31March 1913,when Alban Berg's 'F?nf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtskarten-Texten von Peter Altenberg' (op. 4) was disrupted by audience outrage and fisticuffsbetween protesters and supporters. Influenced by the Secession's fascination with Japanese landscape motifs, Altenberg's collector's eye had initiallybeen caught by the decorative potential of the snapshot. The aesthete thus proselytized photography as a medium of popular access to natural beauty ? which, in the Semmer?ng igi2 album, as in his texts, is to be found equally in feminine grace and inmountain landscapes and flora. The album's incorporation of contemporary popular culture and mass-produced imagery both provides objective correlatives for an autobiographical confessional narrative, of the ageing poet hopelessly love-sick for pubescent girls, and system atizes the emblematic practices familiar from his correspondence (see Peter Altenberg, Rezept dieWelt zu sehen [1995], edited by Barker and Lensing). Character istic of the album as a form is that the image is both self-contained and part of a whole, in loose non-linear sequence that is allusively open-ended. It is also a bold statement of personal recollection, which allows the lyricvoice much less scope than Altenberg's prose poems, but gives prominence to the author's ego, at least partly as an assertion of his new-found personal health at this spa away from the decadence ofVienna. His verbal devotions, especially towards the hotelier's daughter, are visu ally accompanied by various concretizations: of the locusamoenus,of the beatification of his 'saint' in religious icons, or of a beloved either isolated in a nature idyll or singled out in group snapshots that threaten to reinstate her socially. Though more information about manufacturers' colour techniques around 1914might have been provided, Lensing's reading of the album as a multi-media text is particularly successful. As meticulous and innovative as the editors' previous research into Altenberg, the present volume does justice ? in a way that the original could not attempt to embody ? toAltenberg's varied emblematic synthesis of photographic image, textual caption and loose sequence, as thework of an inter-media pioneer. Trinity College Dublin Gilbert J. Carr The CambridgeCompanion toKafka. Ed. by Julian Preece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2002. xix + 254 pp. ?40.00 (hardback), isbn 0-521-66314-8; ?14.95 (paperback), isbn 0-521-6639i-i. A Companion to the Works ofFranz Kafka. Ed. by James Rolleston. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2002. xvi + 372 pp. $75.00; ?65.00. isbn 1-57113-180-9. 'We are now in a very productive era ofKafka scholarship, benefiting from linguis tic theory and cultural studies', James Rolleston declares in his introduction to the Camden House Companion tothe Works of Franz Kafka. The appearance in 2002 of two 'Companions' toKafka, both aimed at the English-speaking market and designed to perform a very different function from Hartmut Binder's two-volume Kqfka Handbuch (1979), is itselfevidence of the buoyant state ofKafka studies. Both reflect in varying degrees the current tendency to situateKafka firmly in his historical and social context while bringing to bear on his writings a diverse range of currendy 296 Reviews expanding methodological approaches. Of the two, theCambridgeCompanion isbetter designed tomeet the needs of non-specialist readers requiring further information about contextual factors vital to an understanding ofKafka's works and wanting some sense of the major critical debates surrounding them. Unlike the more intensely work-oriented collection of essays published by Camden House, the CambridgeCompanion contains a number of general chapters: on 'Kafka's Europe' (Julian Preece), on how and how not to read Kafka (David Constantine), on Kafka and gender (Dagmar C. G. Lorenz), and Kafka and Jewish folklore (IrisBruce), as well as a 'political reading' ofKafka (BillDodd) and a piece on 'Myths and realities inKafka biography' (AnthonyNorthey). The volume also documents Kafka's recep tion at the hands of editors and translators (Osman Durrani), filmmakers (Martin Brady and Helen...