Kafka's Fiction Research Articles

The Absence of Animals in Kafka's Fiction

Abstract:

Philosophical Exploration of Absurdism and Existentialism: A Comparative Study of Kafka's Work The Metamorphosis and The Trial

The philosophical stance about the existence of being and the meaning of life has been a widely discussed subject among philosophers and critics. Existentialism says that a man can construct his own meaning of life by making judicious use of his awareness, free wills and personal responsibilities, but absurdism believes that there is no meaning of life out there. The focus of this study is to explore the absurdist and existential aspects in Kafka's fiction The Metamorphosis (1915) and The Trial (1925). This is qualitative comparative research, and the data which have been collected for this purpose is through purposive sampling techniques. In this study, Camus' theory of absurdism and theory of existentialism has been adopted as a theoretical framework. The study explores in what ways the traces of absurdism and existentialism are present in Kafka's fiction The Metamorphosis and The Trial. The findings show that characteristics of absurdism and existentialism are found in both the works of Kafka and are comparable with each other. For future recommendations, a comparative stylistic analysis of these selected novels can be carried out.

Kafka for the twenty-first century

Franz Kafka's literary career began in the first decade of the twentieth century and produced some of the most fascinating and influential works in all of modern European literature. Now, a hundred years later, the concerns of a new century call for a look at the challenges facing Kafka scholarship in the decades ahead: What more can we hope to learn about the context in which Kafka wrote? How does understanding that context affect how we read his stories? What are the consequences of new critical editions that offer unprecedented access to Kafka's works in manuscript form? How does our view of Kafka change the priorities and fashions of literary scholarship? What elements in Kafka's fiction will find resonance in the historical context of a new millennium? How do we compose a coherent account of a personality with so many contradictory aspects? All these questions and more are addressed by the essays in this volume, written by a group of leading international Kafka scholars. ~~~~~ CONTRIBUTORS: Peter Beicken, Iris Bruce, Jacob Burnett, Uta Degner, Doreen Densky, Katja Garloff, Rolf Goebel, Mark Harman, Robert Lemon, Roland Reuss, Ritchie Robertson, Walter Sokel, John Zilcosky, Saskia Ziolkowski. ~~~~~~~ STANLEY CORNGOLD is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. RUTH V. GROSS is Professor of German and Head of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at North Carolina State University.

“Was auf den Tisch kam, mußte aufgegessen […] werden”: Food, Gender, and Power in Kafka's Letters and Stories

Nur der Hunger kann das ganz und gar Eigentumliche sein; denn mit jeder Speise wird zugleich das Gesetz der anderen, werden die Spielregeln der im Verbot gesetzten Kulinarik ubernommen.1 -Neumann, Literatur 189. The characters in some of Kafka's most extraordinary short fiction, and the figure of himself in his letters,2 exhibit a complex relationship to food. For them, the act of eating is invested with meaning and often with power. Food can be the medium through which the authority of the father is exercised (Brief an den Vater), it can represent a philosophical conundrum (Forschungen eines Hundes) or the unattainable object of a transformed appetite (Die VerwandlungJ. Eating-or fasting-can be a marker of difference (Ein Hungerkunstler), a signifier of social isolation (Die Verwandlung, Der Bau) or the ultimate means of self-assertion (Der Bau). The significance of food and eating in has been interpreted as a response to the Enlightenment paradigm and the 19th-century Diatetik,3 and gender critiques have recently attained their rightful prominence in scholarship.4 Yet so far the intersection of the two approaches has not been explored. This article will show that Kafka's approach to food in his short fiction and letters contains a strong critique of the gender hegemony of his day. It will be argued here that a voracious appetite and the consumption of meat signify masculine privilege in the fiction and letters, and that therefore fasting and vegetarianism represent a rejection of masculinity in those terms. Adopting a marginalized, feminine status, Kafka's male figures employ an oppositional eating practice which challenges hegemonic masculinity. The focus of this article is the novella Die Verwandlung (1915), the short stories Ein Hungerkunstler'' (1924), Der Bau (1931), Forschungen eines Hundes (1931), and some letters, in particular the Brief an den Vater (1935, written in 1919).5 will be portrayed here neither as a nor as a proponent of vegetarianism or animal rights. Instead, this reading invokes Kafka's acknowledged status as a critic of hegemony and a literary expert on power.6 Only relatively recently have scholars begun to argue that Kafka's critique of power extends to a critique of hegemonic masculinity. In so doing, critics are reluctant to claim as a feminist author, whilst acknowledging that Kafka portrays relations between the sexes as power relations.7 This article will build on existing insights into Kafka's critique of masculine power and demonstrate the central role that food and eating (or fasting) play in this critique. Indeed, food is inscribed with gendered power relations and eating (or fasting) is at times a tool for the deployment of gendered power. At times, however, it can become a strategy by which to challenge or undermine that power. Any discussion of the meanings attributed to food and eating in Kafka's work should acknowledge the privileged position of the fast in Kafka's fiction. When eating or fasting are thematized in Kafka's fiction and letters, their subjection to social protocol and investment with cultural meaning are foregrounded. To eat is, for Kafka's figures, to consume social-and therefore gendered-norms. This point can best be made by considering the consequences for male characters of the refusal to eat, i.e., their rejection of the values ingested in eating behavior. Numerous critics have seen in the story Ein Hungerkunstler the prime example of fasting as social isolation.8 In this story, the eponymous protagonist astounds spectators with his prolonged periods of abstinence. However, when the public loses interest in his art, he continues to fast, becoming the only spectator of his enormous achievement, an overlooked sideshow act. Maud Ellmann notes that much of the fasting in Kafka's stories takes place in situations of confinement: in the hunger artist's cage, in Gregor Samsa's room in Die Verwandlung, in the creature's burrow in Der Bau, and in the self-imposed exile of the investigating dog of Forschungen eines Hundes (93). …

Teaching Literature and Medicine

Both the actualities and the metaphorical possibilities of illness and medicine abound in literature: from the presence of tuberculosis in Franz Kafka's fiction or childbed fever in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to disease in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice or in Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska; from the stories of Anton Chekhov and of William Carlos Williams, both doctors, to the poetry of nurses derived from their contrasting experiences. These are just a few examples of the cross-pollination between literature and medicine.It is no surprise, then, that courses in literature and medicine flourish in undergraduate curricula, medical schools, and continuing-education programs throughout the United States and Canada.This volume, in the MLA series Options for Teaching, presents a variety of approaches to the subject. It is intended both for literary scholars and for physicians who teach literature and medicine or who are interested in enriching their courses in either discipline by introducing interdisciplinary dimensions.The thirty-four essays in Teaching Literature and Medicine describe model courses; deal with specific texts, authors, and genres; list readings widely taught in literature and medicine courses; discuss the value of texts in both medical education and the practice of medicine; and provide bibliographic resources, including works in the history of medicine from classical antiquity.

Approaches to Personal Identity in Kafka's Short Fiction: Freud, Darwin, Kierkegaard

Approaches to Personal Identity in Kafka's Short Fiction: Freud, Darwin, Kierkegaard

Gender and Politics in Austrian Fiction

This work draws attention to a small group of Austrian prose writers, sometimes neglected in the past because they do not fit the familiar Protestant canon of German literature. It offers insights into the work of two Austrian writers exiled in the US: Charles Sealsfield and Ferdinand Kurnberger. A reading of Kafka's fiction in the light of homosexual revelations from his diaries, and a re-interpretation of Joseph Roth's Radetzkymarsch suggest an understanding of masculinity, while a look at Ingeborg's Bachmann's novel Malina examines gender relations in this period.

The Past and the Punishments (review)

288 China Review International: Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 1997 Yu Hua, The Past and the Punishments. Translated by Andrew Jones. Honolulu : University ofHawai'i Press, 1996. 277 pp. Paperback $14.95, isbn 0-8248-1782-6. This coUection ofeight short stories and noveUas by Yu Hua (b. i960), one of the prominent New Wave writers (xinchao zuojia, or avant-garde writers) who emerged in the second halfofthe 1980s, represents a promising development in contemporary Chinese fiction. These eight stories and noveUas are: On the Road atEighteen (Shiba sui chumenyuanxing), Classical Love (Gudian aiqing), World Like Mist (Shishi ruyan), The Past and the Punishments (Wangshiyu xingfa), 1986, Blood and Plum Blossoms (Xianxie meihua), The Death ofa Landlord ( Yige dizhu de si), and Predestination (Mingzhongzhuding)—aU written between 1987 and 1992. Except for Predestination, I think the anthology is weU chosen. The members ofthe New Wave mainly draw their inspiration from such foreign writers as Franz Kafka, Kawabata Yasunari, Jorge Luis Borges, and Alain Robbe-GriUet, whose works were translated into Chinese in the 1980s. Besides Yu Hua, others who represent this group include Ge Fei, Hong Feng, Sun Ganlu, Bei Cun, and Lu Xin. Yu Hua is better known outside China, dianks to Zhang Yimou's film To Live (Huozhe), which was based on Yu Hua's novella with the same title. Reading diese stories, the reader can feel the resonance ofKafka. In an article "The Legacies ofKawabata and Kafka" (Collected WorL· ofYu Hua [Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe, 1995], vol. 2, pp. 294-297), Yu Hua acknowledged fhat he was gready inspired by Kafka's fiction. Indeed, die title story The Past and the Punishments clearly resembles Kafka's In the Penal Colony. Yu Hua's fiction is abundant in diemes ofviolence, crime and punishment, anxiety and obsession , and pain and guUt. In his early short story On the Road at Eighteen, the helplessness ofthe naive protagonist in the face ofviolence and die indifference of the driver already foreshadow his later preoccupations. While Yu Hua borrows a great deal from Kafka, he by no means loses sight of the Chinese situation. The recent past, particularly the Cultural Revolution, runs through many ofhis stories. An outstanding example (the best in this anthology ) is the story 1986. Why 1986? It may be that Yu Hua had in mind the powerful precedent ofGeorge OrweU's 1984, written in 1948. By reversing "86," we have 1968—the most violent period of fhe Cultural Revolution. It may be that the year 1986 situates the story in a time detached from the recent past—now the© 1997 by University daughter is in her twenties and fhe memories ofher long-absent father gradually ofHawai'iPressfacje awaV- xhe final two pages ofdie concluding section of1986sum up with Reviews 289 ironie restraint but devastating precision what the translator in his postscript aptiy caUs "a historical amnesia ofthe post-Mao economic boom" (p. 271). Classical Love and Blood and Plum Blossoms demonstrate Yu Hua's deconstruction ofthe traditional patterns ofthe knight-errant's revenge theme and the "talented scholar and beautiful lady" theme in classical vernacular fiction. The Death ofa Landlordis an overturning ofthe CCP's hero myth by making a dandy (the landlord's son) sacrifice himselfby leading Japanese soldiers to a remote district. World LikeMistpaints a living heU haunted by mysterious ghosdy forces. The power ofYu Hua's fiction lies in its abUity to lead fhe reader to a world that defies social norms and which uncovers horrifying and disturbing visions. The New Wave writers, who were mostiy born in the early 1960s, can be considered fhe third generation of Chinese writers since 1949. The first generation consists mainly offhose "rightist" writers who were purged during the 1957 AntiRightist Campaign; the second generation consists mainly ofthose Zhiqing(sentdown educated youths) who were involved in the Red Guard Movement (19661968 ) and were subsequendy sent to the countryside. The least affected by Maoist indoctrination, the New Wave writers have been fortunate to escape the deprivation ofeducation suffered by the Zhiqinggeneration. They have also been fortunate to be able to read (mosdy in Chinese translations) previously unavailable foreign works. With fewer preconceived notions ofliterature, and in a less oppressive atmosphere...

The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka's Fiction: Philosophy, Law, Religion

The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka's Fiction: Philosophy, Law, Religion

Nas garras de Praga

Praga nao aparece na ficcao de Kafka atraves dos nomes de ruas, pracas ou monumentos. As marcas das garras dessa cidade sao bem mais profundas.

The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka's Fiction: Philosophy, Law, Religion (review)

148 SHOFAR Summer 1996 Vol. 14, No.4 reader will find a plethora of often forgotten names. The rich and colorful scene of a literature byJewish writers in German after the Shoah (in Israel, Austria, and Germany) is a chapter of literary history still awaiting critical attention. Thomas Nolden Department of German Wellesley College The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka's Fiction: Philosophy, Law, Religion, by Arnold Heidsieck. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994. 214 pp. $57.00. Heidsieck's contextual study of Kafka is a break with the more recent trends in Kafka criticism that concentrate on the text itself rather than the discourse surrounding it. Instead, he posits the discourses of perception and cognition, law, and ethics as central to understanding Kafka's texts. In so doing, Heidsieck sees Kafka's works shaped by nonaesthetic, academic, and public discussions of the early twentieth century, suggesting that Kafka's modernism arises as much from the discourses of the day as his own introspective imagination and personality. In this study, issues of perception, description, referential belief, cognition, and consciousness remain the central focus for the understanding and interpretation of Kafka's fiction and style. The non-literary sources he encountered in his formative years as a writer provided the impetus for much of his fantasy world. Heidsieck has researched a vast number of published and unpublished sources-reviews, articles on the law, course transcripts, law texts, religious documents-which up till now have remained unexplored in connection with Kafka criticism. The result is a rigorous study that emphasizes Kafka the thinker rather than Kafka the poet. Heidsieck's introduction explains clearly his goals for the book. As a Germanist heavily influenced by philosophical approaches to literature, he is interested in the "understanding of literary truth" (p. 13). By expanding the purview of investigation to Kafka's intellectual sources, Heidsieck necessarily widens the scope of and explanation ofliterary modernism. His assertion that Kafka's precision in description of thoughts, character dispositions, and actions is illustrative of Kafka's desire to portray reality raises questions about the character of reality, and in many ways breaks Book Reviews 149 away from much of recent Kafka CCtUClsm, presenting a challenging perspective that both Kafka scholars and readers should consider. The first four chapters of the work concentrate on investigating the sources for Kafka's methods of descriptive precision: "... what gets narrated in these fictions is almost exclusively what impinges on the main figures' perceptual fields (vision, hearing, etc.) and whatever else occurs in their minds, such as memories, inferences, beliefs, desires, and the like" (p. 10). It is Heidsieck's contention that many Kafka critics have dismissed philosophical readings that can greatly add to understanding the Kafkan reuvre. In this reader's opinion, however, the major strengths of Heidsieck 's book reside in the later chapters which undertake readings of various Kafka texts in more detail and apply the information rather than focusing so heavily on the sources. This combination of discourse analysis and critical reading of various Kafka texts serves to provide new insights into the often interpreted stories like "The Judgment," "Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony," "A Country Doctor," and especially the novels The Castle and The Trial. Heidsieck's last chapter, "Religion, Delusion, and Prejudice," concentrates on a reading of The Castle as a portrayal of a remote Central or Eastern European region before the turn of the century with its ethnically diverse but centrally governed structures. According to Heidsieck , "[t]he novel ... employs an array of religious, ethnic, and legal motifs-the ancient strife between Judaism and nascent Christianity, the competing cultural anthropological assumptions underlying Jewish assimilation and Zionism, and the Jews' threatened legal equality within the German-speaking, increasingly antisemitic environment. These motifs capture the individual anxieties and the collective paranoia ofa community threatened by the social and political transition to modernity" (p. 156). Heidsieck goes on to elucidate the metaphorical allusions to Judaism, but even more interesting is his presentation of the New Testament and Christian allusions with Kafka's text. Fascinating are the accounts ofKafka's readings at the time of the writing of The Castle and how his studies lead Kafka to the "understanding of how firmly ethnic...

The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka's Fiction: Philosophy, Law, Religion

The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka's Fiction: Philosophy, Law, Religion

The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka's Fiction: Philosophy, Law, Religion

The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka's Fiction: Philosophy, Law, Religion

Reviews : The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka's Fiction: Philosophy, Law, Religion. By Arnold Heidsieck. Columbia: Camden House, 1994. Distributed by Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge, Suffolk. Pp. xv + 214. £38

Reviews : The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka's Fiction: Philosophy, Law, Religion. By Arnold Heidsieck. Columbia: Camden House, 1994. Distributed by Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge, Suffolk. Pp. xv + 214. £38

The intellectual contexts of Kafka's fiction: philosophy, law, religion

The intellectual contexts of Kafka's fiction: philosophy, law, religion

The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka's Fiction: Philosophy, Law, Religion

The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka's Fiction: Philosophy, Law, Religion

Kafka's Geometry

In Kafka's fiction there are many journeys but few arrivals. A typical example is the protagonist of Ein Landarzt riding naked through the blizzard, insisting, Niemals komme ich so nach Hause (E 205). 1 The abrupt switch to present tense at this point, which suggests that the preceding story is past but the return journey continues even to the present moment, strengthens the impression that the journey truly is unending. Yet this is the same ten mile distance that he had previously travelled in a moment (nur einen Augenblick). He expresses no concern about direction, only about the horses' sluggishness (langsam wie alte Manner). Common sense insists that if the wagon is advancing homeward, however slowly, it must eventually arrive. This apparent paradox may be dismissed by saying that the account is to be interpreted symbolically. But this is not quite satisfactory, for it denies the intense physical realism of Kafka's narrative. If it is symbolic truth that we are to read here, then we still ought not to gloss over the form, which is quite precise and realistic on the small scale, though contradictory on the large. While vaguely described fantastic journeys are common in fairy tales and mystical writings (cf., Jofen 32-33), Kafka's stories are exceptional for the minute care and tenacity with which they explore and flesh out a fairly consistent alternative of distance which underlies the fantasy. It might seem unwarranted to seek motifs of abstract in Kafka's writings. While geometry appears in the titles of important critical works on Kafka (cf., Stoltke; Sussman), it is used only as a general word for logical precision. Kafka is supposed to have been a poor student of mathematics and theoretical science, and to have suffered paralyzing incompetence in the

After Kafka: The Influence of Kafka's Fiction

After Kafka: The Influence of Kafka's Fiction

After Kafka: the influence of Kafka's fiction

After Kafka: the influence of Kafka's fiction

On the Threshold of a New Kabbalah: Kafka's Later Tales (review)

Reviewed by: On the Threshold of a New Kabbalah: Kafka's Later Tales Clayton Koelb Walter A. Strauss . On the Threshold of a New Kabbalah: Kafka's Later Tales. American University Studies, Series I, Vol.. New York: Lang, 1988. 229 pp. $33.50. Walter A. Strauss, an experienced scholar whose work is well known to students of comparative literature, turns his hand here to the close analysis of Kafka's fiction in 1917 and after. His approach is based on the notion that Kafka is a serious religious thinker—as Max Brod, for one, thought he was—whose theological/philosophical concerns work their way inevitably into his fiction. Serious and careful examination of the aphorisms and "meditations" found in Kafka's notebooks, it is argued, is the most fruitful route to an understanding of the stories and novels. "[I]f the aphorisms and meditations are formulations of [Kafka's] thought in its purest, truest form, then his fictions are structures which attempt to reflect those truths, no matter how faintly and imperfectly, by subjecting them to the illusions of language and of the world, by putting them to the test." The heart of the book, then, is an analysis of the notebook material, particularly that treating religious or philosophical matters. It leads Strauss to conclude that Kafka was "an anima naturaliter cabbalistica," who, although he never studied Kabbalah and may in fact have known very little about it, had a view of truth fundamentally similar to that of the Lurianic tradition. Kafka and Kabbalah share a view of an unredeemed world in which language, art, and indeed all systems of meaning inevitably fail to encompass the truth. Words "can capture only the reflection of its grotesque trace of truth as the point of disappearance." The central chapters on Kafka's aphorisms and their relation to Kabbalah are interesting and often innovative, although one may emerge still unconvinced that the aphoristic notebook entries are indeed Kafka's thought in its "purest, truest form." But the results are disappointing when it comes to Strauss's readings of Kafka's fiction, which often repeat material familiar to us from the work of other scholars, although not always acknowledging those scholars in text or notes. We learn, for example, that "Kafka's fictions (they are all larger or smaller parables) cannot be interpreted." Heinz Politzer said almost exactly this over a quarter of a century ago. The potential reader should be warned that the book evidently lacked editing or proofreading of any kind. It is full of typographical errors, apparently omitted material, and even repetitions, word for word, of sequences of sentences. The frequent quotations from Kafka are at times unrecognizable: the last line of [End Page 828] "Josephine the Singer" is given as ". . . and be forgiven like all her brothers." Theological it may be, but it is not Kafka, who wrote "forgotten" instead of "forgiven." The missing accent marks and, most of all, the missing quotations marks make working through the text a kabbalistic adventure. At times, one is not sure whether to forgive or to forget it. Although evident learning and labor have gone into some aspects of the volume, the book as a whole is unsatisfying and at times downright annoying. Whereas I am glad to have the benefit of Strauss's occasional insights, I wish I could have obtained it in a more congenial form, without much of the packaging. I am not altogether certain that others, even dedicated Kafka scholars, will have the patience for it. Clayton Koelb The University of Chicago Copyright © 1990 Purdue Research Foundation