Kafka's Story Research Articles

Polysemy and suspense as literary and political style: Parabolic narratives of “Jackals and Arabs” and “The Silence of the Sirens”

Parable is a genre of oral and written literature, usually utilized to convey ethical and moral lessons. Yet, Kafka's parabolic stories, “Jackals and Arabs” and “The Silence of the Sirens” undermine any dominant perspective by transforming the conventions of the parable genre: when socially controversial matters are presented through the parable form in a modern context, readers come to observe a variety of perspectives simultaneously, instead of a presiding one in the parabolic stories of Kafka. In detail, such a provocative juxtaposition of perspectives is achieved by narrating the story in deliberately secularized parabolic form. In this context, the point in both stories is by no means to teach readers, but the narrative itself shows that possibilities of readings or variety of perspectives are far from being monolithic or limited. In other words, when the perspectives and interpretations are not easily consumable, the parabolic narrative itself formally invites its readers to suspect their own perspectives, sense of belonging and the elements constitutes their identities. Such deliberate opaqueness and resistance to easy interpretation are among the reasons that render Kafka’s “Jackals and Arabs” and “The Silence of the Sirens” modern literary works.

Searching for Roth, Kafka, and the Other Europe in Spain

Searching for Roth, Kafka, and the Other Europe in Spain Martyna Bryla (bio) When doing my phd on the literary image of eastern europe in the American Cold-War imaginary, I went to Prague one summer, just like Philip Roth did via Vienna, to follow in the footsteps of Franz Kafka. What I actually did was to follow in the footsteps of Roth tracing the steps of Kafka. Whenever I think back to that trip, I am reminded of this evocative sentence from Angelo Maria Ripellino's Magic Prague (1973): "To this day, every evening at five, Franz Kafka returns home to Celetná Street (Zeltnergasse) wearing a bowler hat and black suit" (3). In my mind, I follow Ripellino's lead: as Kafka's dark silhouette recedes into the distance, another figure materializes on an otherwise empty street hazed in golden afternoon light. That other man is of a similar height (they say Kafka was tall!)1 but of a more athletic build than Kafka. By contemporary standards, the man is dressed in a somewhat old-fashioned but still fairly modern manner. If these were the seventies, he would be pinpointed as a Westerner. Kafka never turns around, and the other man never manages to reach him, but they are linked by an invisible bond that transcends time and place that only literature, with its infinite possibilities for imagining other lives in different places, is capable of accommodating. For a long time, I was not aware that Philip Roth had a meaningful connection to Kafka and my part of Europe. As a teenager, I read bits of Portnoy's Complaint (1969), which, per Roth himself, was inspired by Kafka's stories of "spiritual disorientation and obstructed energies" ("In Search"). At the time, however, I would simply reach for whatever my older brother was reading, and Portnoy must have found its way into my hands somewhere between Polish modernism, which we were studying at school, and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934). Roth's fiction was not on the syllabus when I was a student of English Philology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, but I remember devouring several [End Page 102] novels by Milan Kundera after my translation theory professor recommended The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). The mind likes to detect patterns in seemingly unrelated occurrences, so, in hindsight, there seems to be something augural about my reading of Kundera, who had been friends with Roth and whose works I would be rereading several years later for my Roth-inspired PhD. However, when I was an undergraduate, the events of the Prague Spring, Soviet "normalization," and the Velvet Revolution were to me, born in 1983, little more than history book entries vaguely related to Poland's own struggle against communism epitomized in the red clumped letters of the Solidarity logo and Lech Wałęsa's mustachioed profile. My earliest association with the former Czechoslovakia must have been the rubber squeaky toys, including the little mole Krtek—the Mickey Mouse of the Eastern Bloc—my father once brought me from Prague for Christmas. Since we lived close to the border with eastern Slovakia, in the summer we would take short trips to Svidník, Bardejov, or the adjoining spa town, Bardejovské Kúpele, where the empress Sissi once took her water treatments. Whenever we crossed the border between Poland and Slovakia, following a routine wait and search at customs, I was amazed at the jarring contrast between the lush greenery of the Slovakian forests and the ugliness of World War II tanks and planes exhibited along the road in a manner of giant art installations. I was reminded of this intrusion of history and politics into the landscape of everyday life when as a teenager I was introduced to the East-Central European canon: Hašek, Kafka, and Hrabal. However, it was Kundera who brought Czechoslovakia into light for me, even if at the time I was reading him mostly for the titillating intertwining of politics and eroticism. In comparison to Kraków in the early 2000s, the Prague of the 1970s seemed tragic and romantic at the same time, while Kundera's fiction evoked the...

On Literary Plasticity: Readings with Kafka in Ecology, Voice, and Object-Life by Heather H. Yeung

Reviewed by: On Literary Plasticity: Readings with Kafka in Ecology, Voice, and Object-Life by Heather H. Yeung Paul Sutherland Sherban On Literary Plasticity: Readings with Kafka in Ecology, Voice, and Object-Life. By Heather H. Yeung. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2020. vii+111 pp. $59.99. ISBN 978-3-030-44157-9. 'Plastic has bad press.' So begins Heather H. Yeung's book. In her introductory chapter, she emphasizes plastic's political image by referencing National Geographic articles that portray plastic as the new 'bedrock' of our planet, replacing floating icebergs with drifting plastic bags (p. 1). Despite these opening remarks, On Literary Plasticity is not an anti-plastic treatise. Rather, the book questions humanity's 'addiction to plastic'. It takes Kafka's story Die Sorge des Hausvaters as its focal point and elucidates the titular concept via a close reading. Yeung maintains that critics must consider plastic in its various guises: plastic history, neuroplasticity, linguistic plasticity, and (her own contribution here) literary plasticity (p. 3). Far from a condemnation of plastic, this book dwells with Kafka's Kurzprosa to elucidate the plastic processes of reading and encourage a deeper understanding of 'the hold that plastic exerts on us' (p. 4). In Chapter 2, Yeung highlights the word and figure of 'Odradek' in Kafka's story, its plastic implications, and propounds an ethical imperative from the text. Critics mostly disagree on how to categorize Odradek, thus leading Yeung to conclude that it evades taxonomy (p. 42). However, as the story progresses, Odradek becomes more familiar, moves from neuter to masculine pronouns, and receives a voice. Yeung argues that this development reflects the human disposition to value familiarity and fear alterity (p. 43). The image of Odradek mutates like plastic and, like plastic's many polymers, Odradek contains various synthetic units (p. 48). Yeung thus draws Kafka's ethical injunction from the text, namely that we must not take literary creation for granted, and we must allow a story 'to simultaneously take us over and resist comprehension' (p. 44). In Chapter 3, Yeung considers Roland Barthes's Le Plastique in tandem with Kafka's story because both texts share critical qualities in common with plastic; [End Page 312] they are 'ultimately unnatural' and mobile (pp. 58–59). Yeung illustrates their unnatural aspects by showing that each of the texts evades genre; they elude categorization into short story, aphorism, prose poem, or scientific observation (p. 63). Hedging genre, both present unnatural morphology (p. 60). Additionally, owing to their small size, they share the quality of mobility with plastic; they can easily travel in a pocket or purse, and one might quickly replicate or recite them just as one might recycle plastic (p. 66). On Literary Plasticity offers a particularly valuable contribution to Kafka scholarship in its fourth chapter, wherein Yeung diverges from the most familiar reading of the final paragraph of Die Sorge des Hausvaters. Noting that Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, Walter Benjamin, and 'Theodor Adorno all assume the narrator to be the eponymous Hausvater, Yeung focuses instead on the plasticity of points of view (p. 88). 'Thus, she shifts the 'work and literary power' of the text from the figure of the father onto the text's 'formal machinations' (p. 89) and argues that it would be mistaken to assume that the narrative voice of the opening paragraph coincides directly with that of the Hausvater. Instead, Yeung contends that the narrative voice is 'disembodied', and in so doing offers a novel interpretation (p. 89). Although the final chapter presents a satisfying shift from Kafka's early twentieth century to plastic's twenty-first century, I had hoped to find a more explicit illumination of the political implications of Yeung's engaging assertion. If we rely extensively on plastic objects and plastic modes of thought in the Anthropocene age, precisely how might we perceive oceanic plastic anew after Yeung's reading of Kafka? Yeung implies that we ought to embrace literary plasticity and neuroplasticity in our approach to the ecological threat of plastic objects, yet the political claim remains implicit (p. 99). An explicit visualization of how this perception of plastic might transmute the environmental gaze on...

Kafka’s Messages

Reading Kafka's literature today, in Jerusalem/Al-Quds, presents us with a challenge. Reading Kafka ‘here and now’, following his ‘messages’, concealed in his prose, notes and letters, demands us to engage anew with our traditions. It calls us to reconsider the legacies of Kafka's own literature, revising European modernism, while studying Talmudic and Kabbalistic texts, learning Chassidic tales and reading Arabic and Persian stories. A ‘Kafkan’ reading thus demands a permanent interruption in our fields of study, reflecting the very idea of Studium (studying, Talmud). Kafka's Messenger, who carries with him—on an endless path—the secret of literature, invites us to a journey, a path of studying that spreads into a Eurasian map of readership. This method of reading, namely a reflection about ‘the way’, is perhaps the first (and most significant) lesson of Kafka's readers. Our own (rather short) journey will follow the figure of a Messenger, as it appears in Kafka's story ‘An Imperial Message’, turning, however, to the Talmudic legend and the Chassidic tale, and to a Sufi Persian epic poem, in a search for a proper echo of the untold secret. This study reflects not only the possibilities of the comparative approach but also the radical, ‘messianic’ potential, being kept on the paths of Kafka's writing.

Literarische Fürsprache bei Franz Kafka: Rhetorik und Poetik by Doreen Densky

Reviewed by: Literarische Fürsprache bei Franz Kafka: Rhetorik und Poetik by Doreen Densky Aaron Carpenter Doreen Densky, Literarische Fürsprache bei Franz Kafka: Rhetorik und Poetik. Berlin: De Gruyter. 2020. 230 pp. Doreen Densky's book Literarische Fürsprache bei Franz Kafka: Rhetorik und Poetik is an excellent analysis of Franz Kafka's use of the advocate and advocacy (Fürsprache) to speak for and to various groups in his literary works, to his legal professor, and in everyday life. Kafka's life as an advocate started with his work as a trained lawyer working at an insurance firm, progressed through his speaking for Yiddish theater, and ended with his speaking for animals [End Page 135] near the end of his life. Denksy offers a detailed analysis of how Kafka diminished the role of the advocate over the course of his three novels, while leaving open the possibility of advocating for others through his own writing. Densky begins by examining Kafka's advocacy work in his job as a lawyer. She notes that he would approve documents with his initials, rather than a signature, as was common (64). This returns in the protagonist Josef K.'s abbreviated last name in Der Proceß, which, as Densky argues, also makes him into a representative of the everyman (113). This removal of identity is even more pronounced in Das Schloß, in which the protagonist is reduced to a single letter: K. Kafka also served as an advocate for Yitzhak Löwy and the Yiddish theater, both by giving a speech on the Yiddish language at a fundraiser and by helping Löwy and the troupe find financial assistance. Densky argues that Kafka acted as an editor of Jewish literature and poetry in his speech, but that it could only work, "weil er die Richter ausblendet, die überzeugt werden sollen und weil er sich von Löwy zum Redezeitpunkt abwendet?" (83–84). Densky argues that Kafka's speech, rather than simply advocacy for Löwy, advocates for the possibilities of what Yiddish could be, to speak for itself (92). This connection to speaking for the Yiddish theater and speaking for German-speaking Jews also appears in Kafka's animal stories, which are discussed later in the book. In Kafka's animal stories, speaking for Jewish people and speaking for animals, who cannot speak for themselves, come together to include such animals as the giant mole, the ape turned human Red Peter, and Josefine the Mouse Singer. The story "The Village Schoolmaster" features two rival advocates whose writings on the state of research of the giant mole leads to a social dispute. Red Peter's former life as an animal is also tested in various perspectives, most prominently Red Peter's report to the academy. Josefine the Mouse Singer is portrayed in a similar way in his thoughts on "small literature" and is reflected in how it performs as Yiddish as a pure performance that does not have to speak for anyone, which connects with Kafka's advocacy for Yiddish and Yiddish theater back in 1912. Kafka himself became the advocate for those who cannot speak for themselves. Densky also examines how the ability of people to advocate for themselves and others diminishes and almost disappears throughout the course of Kafka's three novels: Der Verschollene, Der Proceß, and Das Schloß. [End Page 136] In Der Verschollene, Karl Roßmann's successful advocacy for the eponymous stoker of the opening chapter becomes a transition from justice to discipline in the uncle's advocacy for Karl (141). While Karl Roßmann disappears into a fantastical theatricality in Der Verschollene, Josef K. in Der Proceß is brought into the dreamlike theatricality of his own trial (109–10). As in Der Verschollene, Josef K. must play a role in the court system that entwines him ever deeper within it, but he is ultimately unsuccessful in advocating for himself. Der Proceß opens with an act of Gegensprache rather than Fürsprache when Josef K. is marked as an alleged libeler in the speech of those in power, already diminishing his role as an advocate (109). In Der Proceß, Josef K.'s attack on the organization charging him inadvertently...

Rochelle Tobias and Kafka's Country Doctor

Rochelle Tobias and Kafka's Country Doctor John Zilcosky (bio) Years before I met Rochelle Tobias, I met her through her writing. It was the summer of 2000. I had just finished my first year of teaching at the University of Toronto and was allowing myself to exhale and leaf aimlessly through journals in the reading room of Robarts Library. I stumbled across The Germanic Review and felt myself drawn to an article on Kafka; I was in the midst of writing a book about him. From the article's first phrase—"Of all the accusations made against the country doctor in Kafka's tale …"—I was hooked, not yet by the content but by the style (120). I sensed, as one does with good writing, a voice. I could hear this person, a person whom the byline said was Rochelle Tobias. And this person, I knew by the end of the first paragraph, had something elegant, self-effacing, and luminous about her. Her language was evocative, even oracular, but always lucid. It was straightforward yet pointed toward something beyond. Still not cognizant of the argument of the essay, I felt myself transported into someone else's way of speaking. And I loved it. As I read, I realized that the genre, too, was unusual. This was a scholarly article apparently, published in an academic journal, yet there was no mention of secondary literature (I was too engrossed to flip to the endnotes), and it read like a lively essay, even a story. The author, I realized, was retelling this story that I already knew, Kafka's "A Country Doctor"—retelling it the way we retell stories, with a twist. When Kafka describes the impossible—"unearthly horses" of Homeric proportions contorting themselves and "turning" out of a tiny stall—this author insisted that Kafka was not just parodying a birth; he was [End Page 489] meditating on what it meant to invent things. Kafka's equines embodied fantasy itself, the "turns" of phrase that are at the heart of every story (125). I now realized that this storyteller, this Rochelle Tobias, whose voice I now felt I knew, was not only good at telling and retelling tales. She was good at thinking about them too. I got to the end of the essay in what felt like minutes but could have been hours; I was starting to experience time as Kafka's Country Doctor did. When I reached the last sentence, I understood the author's—Rochelle Tobias's—point in showing us that Kafka's story was about storytelling. She had figured out that Kafka's Country Doctor was not actually sent to save the dying boy, as the surface plot tells us, but to help him die. And not just to help him die but to help the doctor himself die. For it turns out that the story of the dying boy might have been invented by the doctor, in an attempt to delay his own death—as in One Thousand and One Nights—and also to allay the pain that all dying causes. The doctor is not the priest, Kafka tells us, and he is certainly not the Messiah, Rochelle Tobias insists. The doctor cannot save the body meant for death. But he can, if he is also a storyteller, provide that body—the boy's, the doctor's, and our own—with a way of coming to terms with dying. And he can make our living, which Kafka did not always distinguish from "the eternal torments of dying," more bearable. I realized, as I read Rochelle Tobias's essay on that quiet summer day in 2000, that her essay was doing the same for my own living and dying, and I was grateful for this person I had not yet met. When Rochelle's and my paths finally crossed at Johns Hopkins years later, I saw her among the students and colleagues who depended on and cherished her, and I realized that she was performing this service every day for them. Rochelle, I discovered, did her own doctoring and storytelling. As a teacher, mentor, and colleague, she made—and still makes—the living of those around...

Kafka's Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier by Naama Harel

Reviewed by: Kafka's Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier by Naama Harel Carsten Strathausen Kafka's Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier. By Naama Harel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Pp. 204. Cloth $55.00. ISBN 978-0472131792. The premise of Naama Harel's insightful study of Kafka's animals is deceptively simple. What happens, she asks, if we refuse to interpret these figures allegorically—a critical tradition that has reigned supreme for most of the twentieth century and was due, in part, to Max Brod's heavy-handed editorial interventions into the unpublished manuscripts he inherited after Kafka's death—and instead read them straightforward, and literally, as stories about animals? What if the speaking ape Red Peter (from "A Report to an Academy") is not considered an allegory about Jewish assimilation or [End Page 611] about the human history of slavery, colonialism, capitalist exploitation, transcendence, etc., but rather considered a living being that, like all beings, stands for itself and not for something else? The idea is not as far-fetched as it might appear. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, exhibitions and performances of "learned apes" dressed like people and imitating basic human behavior (drinking, smoking, shaking hands) became increasingly popular in Western Europe and the US, which prompted well-known psychologists and anthropologists like Wolfgang Köhler and Lightner Witmer to test apes' cognitive abilities and signs of language use. Roland Reuß, the editor of the ongoing facsimile edition of Kafka's works, even found an advertisement for a learned ape show in the Prager Tagblatt (which Kafka read diligently) from March 1917, right around the time he wrote and published "A Report to an Academy." There is little doubt that Kafka, an avid reader of journals and magazines, was familiar with the subject and had heard of the most famous cases like the chimpanzees "Sultan" and "Consul Peter," both of whom are considered possible prototypes for Kafka's "Red Peter." As Harel points out, "the only difference between these performing apes and Red Peter is that the latter also learned to speak" (52). Harel is certainly not the first scholar to suggest nonallegorical readings of Kafka's animal stories. She herself notes that "the allegorical conception of nonhuman animals in fiction has been replaced in recent scholarship by a zoopoetic approach" (5). Still, with regard to Kafka, Harel is the first scholar to pursue this zoopoetic approach in a comprehensive and systematic manner across the board, with individual chapters dedicated to close readings of "The Metamorphosis," "A Report to an Academy," "Jackals and Arabs," "Researches of a Dog," and "Josefine, the Singer or The Mouse Folk." Her focus throughout remains on the myriad ways in which Kafka succeeds in undermining "the species barrier, creating a liminal human-animal space" that Harel refers to as "humanimality" (13) or "aspecies being" (133). The "gigantic vermin" identified as Gregor Samsa, for example, exhibits so many contradictory biological traits that its being cannot possibly be identified in scientific-entomological terms (as Nabokov and others have demonstrated). Instead, "it becomes clear that his verminous existence is not forced on Gregor from outside, by nature, but from his immediate human environment, namely his parents and sister" (46). Another example is Kafka "drawing attention to the anthropocentric premise of ordinary language" (138) by speaking of "hands" rather than "paws" to describe the aspecies protagonist in "The Burrow." This word choice prompts readers to assume that the protagonist is human until that fiction becomes increasingly untenable as the story progresses. A similar hermeneutic process occurs when Kafka prompts his readers to think of the protagonist Josefine as a mouse when, in fact, the only support for that reading is the ambiguous title of the story, "Josefine, the Singer or The Mouse People," and the equally ambiguous reference to people's "fur" that seems to designate mice [End Page 612] yet might also function as "a synecdoche for a fur coat" worn by humans (150). In both cases, Kafka simultaneously invites and frustrates our efforts to maintain the species boundaries we are used to, implicitly making the point that species identity is neither biological nor objective but based on cultural...

Kafka's Other Prague: Writings from the Czechoslovak Republic

Kafka's Other Prague: Writings from the Czechoslovak Republic

The Law and the Void: Hans Christian Andersen and Franz Kafka. Two Modern Parabolists

Of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin aptly wrote: ‘everything he describes makes statements about something other than itself’. Indeed, we are constantly challenged to decipher what Kafka’s meticulous prose is pointing at, though the story itself works on its own premises. The inherent polysemy of ‘Eine kaiserliche Botschaft’ (‘An Imperial Message’) or ‘Ein Hungerkünstler’ (‘A Hunger Artist’) suggests, instead, the ancient parable tradition. But Kafka’s modern parables diverge radically from the tradition. They obey a law, yet it is elusive, hence they are examples of the modern parable. In this article I take as my starting point Gila Safran– Naveh’s claim that Kafka is chronologically the first in the modern parable tradition. I assert that Hans Christian Andersen’s much earlier fairytales ‘Skyggen’ (‘The Shadow’), ‘Ole Lukøie’ and ‘Hjertesorg’ (‘Heartache’) can legitimately be interpreted as modern parables as well, because there is a striking structural similarity between them and the Kafka stories. In my article I focus on the parabolic character of Andersen’s tales since — unlike in Kafka’s stories — this topic has not yet been discussed by scholars exhaustively. Kafka’s short stories serve merely as a benchmark of the modern parable. Generally, I suggest reading many of Andersen’s stories as literature that sabotages the didactic parable.

Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism by Kata Gellen

Reviewed by: Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism by Kata Gellen Holly Yanacek Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism. By Kata Gellen. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 250. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-0810138933. With Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism, Kata Gellen makes an important contribution to modernist scholarship and the interdisciplinary field of sound studies through her analysis of noise in Kafka's oeuvre. The book participates in the recent turn in scholarship to define "modernist epistemologies"—that is, to examine "the ways in which modernist art and literature produce new modes of perception and knowledge" (199). Gellen aims to show how Kafka responds to two central crises of modernism—the crisis of narration and the crisis of knowledge—through the treatment of noise in his collected stories, notebooks, and letters. A central premise of this book is that noise is a "productive obstacle" in modernist literary narration in general and in Kafka's works in particular (3). Gellen's interpretations reveal that Kafka never settled on a single, unified approach to sound. Instead, she emphasizes that each one of Kafka's texts that deals with sound presents a different attempt to explore the productive tension between noise and writing (33). Noise puts a strain on many of the characters in Kafka's stories, and Gellen's book examines the literary significance of these disruptive, persistent, and enigmatic noises. Kafka and Noise is noteworthy as the first sustained English-language study of sound in Kafka's collected works. Jürgen Daiber's Kafka und der Lärm: Klanglandschaften der frühen Moderne (2015) demonstrates a similar interest in sound in Kafka's writings; however, the book primarily focuses on Kafka's own frustrations with noise that disrupted his writing. Gellen adds to the scholarship on Kafka and sound through her innovative application of film theory and her focus not on Kafka's biographical writings, but on the literary significance of noise in his narration. Her approach yields fresh interpretations of Kafka's stories, including "Großer Lärm" (1912), "Die Verwandlung" (1915), "Das Schweigen der Sirenen" (1917), "Forschungen eines Hundes" (1922), "Der Bau" (1923), and "Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse" (1924). Although the use of film theory to analyze sound in Kafka's works is new, the study of the connection between Kafka and cinema has a long history, which Gellen traces back to Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno's debates about gesture in Kafka's writing in the 1930s. Inspired also by Gilles Deleuze and [End Page 613] Félix Guattari's interpretation of noise in Kafka in their theory of a minor literature, Gellen picks up where these critics left off and offers sustained close readings of the problem of sound in Kafka's works. Gellen's justification for her approach to analyze Kafka's literary works and silent film together in Kafka and Noise is persuasive. Concepts from film theory, such as acoustic close-up and acousmatic sound, provide the language necessary to analyze noise in literature, a silent medium. Gellen's application of these concepts offers new insights into Kafka's works that would not be possible with literary concepts and narrative theory alone. In addition, the interpretation of literary sound with film terminology illuminates what literature (and cinema) can do and what it cannot do, and thus this book makes a significant contribution to genre studies. There is another reason why concepts from film theory, rather than concepts in the field of sound studies, form the methodological underpinning of Kafka and Noise. According to Gellen, sound studies has "has, to a large extent, ignored literary sound" because literature is a medium that does not directly produce actual sounds (203). However, she argues that sound studies would have much to gain by focusing on literary sound as an object of analysis, and her book makes a strong case for that assertion. In each of the book's four chapters, Gellen introduces concepts from film theory and applies them in her close readings of Kafka's letters and stories, which she interprets...

Very Broad Laws

Extremely broad laws offend due process. Although the problem has not been lost on courts, their solution to date has been haphazard: casting breadth as a species of uncertainty—ambiguity or vagueness—and repurposing uncertainty-focused doctrine accordingly. The trouble is, breadth and uncertainty are not the same. They have different analytic features and raise distinct concerns, making the tools designed to resolve uncertainty ill-suited to reining in breadth. Vague and ambiguous laws deprive people of notice about what the law requires. They evoke the Star Chamber and Kafka stories—the dread of inhabiting an incomprehensible legal order. With broad laws, the issue is not notice but reach. Broad statutes can be plenty clear about what they require. The problem is they sweep in too much everyday conduct, arousing worry about outsized power and arbitrary enforcement. Here, the literary specter is not Kafka, but Orwell, and the nightmare is not an opaque legal system; it is a police state. Extremely broad laws, in this sense, are problematic for the same basic reason as general warrants: they afford state officials practically boundless justification to interfere with private life. After expounding the problem abstractly, I close by exploring how courts might tackle the breadth problem in practice—and I ultimately suggest that judges should be empowered to hold statutes “void-for-breadth.”

Kafka and Wittgenstein: The Case for an Analytic Modernism by Rebecca Schuman

Reviewed by: Kafka and Wittgenstein: The Case for an Analytic Modernism by Rebecca Schuman Jennifer L. Geddes Kafka and Wittgenstein: The Case for an Analytic Modernism. By Rebecca Schuman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 220. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-0810131842. Cloth $99.95. ISBN 978-0810131460. In Kafka and Wittgenstein, Rebecca Schuman argues that the search for what Kafka means is "sorely mistaken" (5). In fact, "the problems and illusions we portend to uncover, the important questions we attempt to answer—Is Josef K. guilty? If so, of what? What does Gregor Samsa's transformed body mean? Is Land Surveyor K. a real land surveyor or not?—themselves presuppose a bigger delusion: that such questions can be asked in the first place" (5). This exposure of the bigger delusion hiding behind the smaller, more obvious one, and of questions that cannot be asked, is a common thread Schuman finds in the works of Kafka and Wittgenstein—the unusual pairing that structures this book. By reading the two alongside each other and breaking down the usual divide between analytic philosophy and literature, Schuman argues that, "Kafka undermines several pretenses about prose narration in much the same way Wittgenstein undermines the pretense of philosophical progress" (11). In doing so, Schuman makes a convincing case for a new way of thinking about modernism that brings together arguably the most important philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century with the most important literary author of that same time period to show that "logical modernism belongs with modernist studies" (39). If one has a strong aversion to the likes of symbolic logic, it will be hard to muster the openness needed to follow Schuman's lead, and yet, she offers ways of reading Kafka that are strikingly new and worth considering, opening up unseen paths to follow from the very points at which studies of his work have been treading the same ground over and over, for example, pondering the question of whether Josef K. is guilty. The book is divided into two main sections, each with its own theme. The first focuses on logical modernism, bringing the early Wittgenstein's philosophy on the logical analysis of language in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1918) together with Kafka's earlier works: The Trial (1925), "The Metamorphosis" (1915), and "The Judgment" (1913). The second moves to the later Wittgenstein of the [End Page 657] Investigations (1953) and Kafka's The Castle (1926), "In the Penal Colony" (1919), and his last story, "Josefine the Singer" (1924), to focus on the theme of analytic skepticism. As the book's subtitle suggests, Schuman wants to offer up for thought the idea of an analytic modernism, or "a literary modernism that shares the ideology—intentionally or not—of the early analytic tradition in philosophy" (6). For those not familiar with Wittgenstein's philosophy, the book will be at times a tough read—Wittgenstein's writings are notoriously difficult—but Schuman presents helpful synopses of his ideas at various points in the book for newcomers to his work. Schuman's own excitement about the ways in which Wittgenstein's complex ideas find their parallels in Kafka's literary works propels the reader to continue: for example, she writes, "I have found that three of Kafka's most famous stories … do nothing less than dramatize Wittgenstein's most important findings about logic and language on the fictional plane, in a fictional reality, with fictional facts" (37). Schuman sums up her accomplishment in the book as "six works, six questions, and six ways that Wittgenstein has helped us to see that [these questions] cannot actually be asked" (194). Really? Thankfully Schuman herself poses the question one might ask after reading such a summary at the end of a dense book: "what has been the point of such an exploration for Kafka studies?" (194). To show that the questions readers and scholars have been asking about Kafka's stories and novels for several decades cannot actually be asked leaves the reader standing as if at the checkout counter with nothing in one's basket, despite having spent hours in the store, poring over goods and prices, analyzing cost-per...

Northrop Frye and Franz Kafka: From Causality to Mythopoeia

Northrop Frye and Franz Kafka:From Causality to Mythopoeia Robert D. Denham (bio) The incongruous and the inevitable, which are combined in tragedy, separate into opposite poles of irony. At one pole is the inevitable irony of human life. What happens to, say, the hero of Kafka's Trial is not the result of what he has done, but the end of what he is, which is an "all too human" being. The archetype of the inevitably ironic is Adam, human nature under sentence of death. At the other pole is the incongruous irony of human life, in which all attempts to transfer guilt to a victim give that victim something of the dignity of innocence. Northrop Frye Frye did not write anything extensively about Kafka, but he was widely familiar with the stories and novels. He owned two editions of Amerika, and his library contained copies of The Trial, The Castle, Letters to Felice, and The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, which was a collection, brought together by Kafka's friend Max Brod, of everything that Kafka published or intended for publication. It includes the stories published in The Judgment, The Metamorphosis, A Country Doctor, A Hunger Artist, and In the Penal Colony. The copy of The Penal Colony in Frye's own library, now at Victoria University in Toronto, contains his marginal annotations, as does his copy of The Castle. In preparation for a 1949 talk [End Page 49] on Kafka for cbc Radio, Frye read Kafka's stories (in his diary he does not record which ones) and Max Brod's biography of Kafka, which Frye calls "silly" (cw 8:148). He gave his 750-word talk on 20 March 1949. In his diary he keeps referring to his Kafka "paper," which seems to indicate that he read his radio talk from a manuscript. While the texts for a number of Frye's cbc broadcasts are extant, the one on Kafka did not survive, if in fact it existed at all. Still, on two occasions in his diary Frye recorded what amounts to an abstract of his paper. On 5 March 1949 he wrote, "my main points are the Chaplinesque figure at the centre & the Book of Job as the sun he revolves around" (cw 8:148). Three days later he remarked, "My Kafka paper says his main figure has three allegorical strands: the Jew in a Gentile community, the artist in society, & Kafka as the son of his father. Put them together & you have, besides Kafka, Joyce's Shem" (cw 8:150). In a notebook from the 1950s Frye wrote, "I know nothing about Kafka" (cw 15:67), but that is clearly an overstatement. He knew enough to say in a 1947 review of Angel Flores's The Kafka Problem, "a symposium of essays and critical studies on the great German writer, now one of the major influences on modern literature. How deeply he has penetrated into our culture is indicated by the names of the contributors, which include W.H. Auden, Albert Camus ["Hope and Absurdity"], Max Lerner ["The Human Voyage"], Franz Werfel ["Recollections"], and Denis Saurat ["A Note on The Castle"], to mention only the best-known ones, and which appear to represent at least a dozen literatures" (cw 29:52). In the late 1940s Frye outlined an elaborate series of studies that were part of a large, never-completed project called "Blake and Modern Thought." He projected one of the parts of this project to be a study of the symbolism of Kafka (cw 15:124). In 1960 he wrote, The powerful appeal of Kafka for our age is largely due to the way in which such stories as The Trial or The Castle manage to suggest at once the atmosphere of an anxiety dream, the theology of the Book of Job, and the police terrorism and bureaucratic anonymity of the society that inspired Freud's term 'censor.' It was the same appeal in the myth of Waiting for Godot that, so to speak, identified Samuel Beckett as a contemporary writer. (cw 29:159–60). Additionally, as regards Frye's knowledge of Kafka, he referred to "A Report to an Academy...

Franz and Georg: Cantor's Mathematics of the Infinite in the Work of Kafka

The infinite plays a significant role in many of Franz Kafka's stories. In this note we show that a version of the middle-thirds Cantor set construction appears in Kafka's Great Wall of China. His description of the Wall's construction mirrors an iterated system of functions whose limit set is the Cantor set; we present the relevant mathematical details and a close reading of the text of the story to illustrate this metaphor.

Ideological Constructs through the Medium of Fiction in Kafka's “In der Strafkolonie”

“In der Strafkolonie” offers a highly effective fictionalized account of the overarching potency of power structures, as well as of the intrinsically ideological nature of power as such. Kafka's story could then be said to function as a critique of ideology, one whose implied conclusion coincides, to some extent, with that postulated by Louis Althusser in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” The first half of this article explores the parallels between the two texts, focusing on two main lines of inquiry: the semantic and metaphoric reverberations between Kafka's literalized apparatus and Althusser's notion of ideological state apparatuses, and the two accounts' thematic and conceptual preoccupation with the self-reproducing and ultimately empty structure of institutional power. The second half of this article, however, explores the ways in which the fictional status of Kafka's text allows for an ideology critique that is far more effective and revealing than Althusser's theoretical one. This, I argue, is enabled by the story's elimination of subjectivity qua subjectivity (which, according to Althusser, is a necessary condition for ideological interpellation).

Truth in narrative fiction

Narrative fiction has the power to unsettle our deep-seated intuitions and expectations about what it means to live an ethically good life, and the kind of society that best facilitates this. Sometimes its disruptive power is disclosive, leading to an ethically significant shift in perception. I contend that the disruptive and disclosive powers of narrative fiction constitute a potential for ethical knowledge. I construe ethical knowledge as a learning process, oriented by a concern for truth, which involves the rational agency and affective engagement of an embodied human subject. For the purposes of showing this, I engage critically with Adorno’s reading of Kafka, using Kafka's story ‘In the Penal Colony’ to challenge Adorno’s analysis.

Tableau Before the Law: Albert Camus' The Fall After Deconstruction

At the beginning of Derrida's ‘Before the Law’, a reading of Kafka's story with that title, is an epigraph from Montaigne's Essays: ‘… science does likewise (and even our law, it is said, has legitimate fictions on which it bases the truth of its justice)…’. Derrida again refers to this quotation in ‘Force of Law’, asking what a ‘legitimate fiction’ might be and what it would mean to establish the basis for the truth of justice. With reference to these writings on the status of narrative and the law, as well as to other texts by Derrida, this paper examines the story of the judge-penitent in Camus' The Fall and, in particular, this ironic reading of the aporetic experience of standing ‘before the law’. What does the narrative, The Fall, entail? Camus writes that the man who speaks in this text is involved in a ‘calculated confession’. How are the borders between truth and fiction, justice and the law, negotiated in this reckoning ‘before the law’?

Material Difference: Modernism and the Allegories of Discourse by William D. Melaney (review)

Reviewed by: Material Difference: Modernism and the Allegories of Discourse by William D. Melaney Salvatore Pappalardo William D. Melaney , Material Difference: Modernism and the Allegories of Discourse Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012, 255 pp. William D. Melaney's Material Difference: Modernism and the Allegories of Discourse, a comparative study of Modernist prose and poetry, attempts to place modern literature at the juncture of two evolving philosophical movements that will later develop into Deconstruction and Critical Theory. The author adopts a double-pronged approach to Modernism, emphasizing the productive tension between two different hermeneutic approaches that are often regarded as irreconcilable. It is the convergence of these critical discourses, and the use of the interpretive tools they offer, that illuminate the ways in which Modernist art appears predisposed to allegorical completion in its aspiration to break with historical continuity [End Page 329] and its simultaneous acknowledgement of tradition. The main argument of the book, a powerful and compelling claim, is the notion that formalist and historicist approaches to literature, which evolve from fundamentally different philosophical traditions with roots in idealism and materialism, display structurally relevant points of contact and can therefore be utilized as complementary critical tools. Melaney constructs the theoretical backbone of his argument by emphasizing the critical relationship between Peter Bürger and Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Derrida. Rather than emphasizing the divergences of these theoreticians, Melaney looks for parallels and common ground. He further conducts an analysis of allegorical prose and allegorical poetry thanks to case studies of Joyce, Kafka, Malraux and Andric on the one hand, Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Williams and Stevens on the other. Two final sections on the semiotics of reading and Modernism and material difference conclude this twelve-chapter study. Melaney begins to interrogate the theoretical compatibility of the two hermeneutic paradigms by contrasting the historicist foundation of Bürger's Theory of the Avant-garde with the critical materialism of Benjamin's work on Modernism. Bürger's theory rests upon an evolutionary and linear historicism, in which artistic invention cannot produce a complete rupture since its production depends upon its very own socio-historic circumstances. Benjamin, instead, regards historical reality as a discontinuous field of virtual writing that remains open to interpretive exigencies. Melaney continues to trace these traditions by comparing Adorno to Derrida, claiming that the opposition between their speculative systems is merely conventional. Since in Adorno the materiality of the artwork resists Hegelian Aufhebung, i.e., the sublation resulting from the dialectical movement of the Spirit, the work of art can produce a counter-history that opposes teleological progression. Melaney couples Adorno's unorthodox reading of Hegel with Derrida's discussion of the trace as an ideality that resists metaphysics. Allegorical modernism represents, according to the author, the textual site of convergence of these two movements. The author presents eight case studies as substantive evidence of his claims. Indeed, the great merit of this truly comparative endeavor is the attempt of combining a theoretical discussion on materiality and allegory with the analysis of authors writing in a variety of different languages. Melaney discusses James Joyce's aesthetics of displacement in the "Oxen of the Sun" episode in Ulysses, underlining the tension between the mythographic effort of the novel and the genealogical presentation exhibited in this particular chapter. The critical importance of the essay "Ulysses, Order and Myth" elegantly prefigures the deferred chapter on T.S. Eliot, where the author argues for the possibility of an autobiographical approach to a founding figure of New Criticism. A discussion of Augustine and the role of autobiography in the conceptualization of time help Melaney in his provocative interpretation [End Page 330] of the "autobiographical trace" in the reading of The Four Quartets. Franz Kafka's novels and short stories are presented through the non-historical aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy. For the author, Kafka's exposure of the ironic fallacies of a language that is indeterminate and thus fails to record traumatic memory constitutes the promise of a potentially ethical future, free of the pronouncements of the past. André Malraux's novel La condition humaine suggests the possibility of a dialectical resolution of political conflict, but at the same time frustrates expectations...

Le Web des troubles alimentaires. Un nouvel art de jeûner ?

The contemporary phenomenon of pro-ana (or, more accurately, ana-mia ) websites, focussing on anorexia nervosa and on other eating disorders, problematizes the notions of body, presence, and performativity. Throughout their texts, videos, and pictures, bloggers and online forum members document their daily activities, their aesthetic sensibilities. Stigmatized by public opinion, they adopt radical stances, describe themselves as heroic fighters and express themselves by a terminology of citizenship - choice, freedom, right to be anorexic or bulimic... The relationship between the performers and their online audience is mainly driven by a quest for political support and autonomy. The art of fasting, outlined in Kafka's seminal story Ein Hungerkunstler, turns into a collective effort of vigilance and negotiation of the limits of bodily performativity in digital environments, and in the broader context of public life.

Refashioning Print Literature:

In addressing the issue of modern China and world literature in the age of globalization, we should not neglect this fact: in contemporary Chinese society as well as elsewhere, the elite literary market has been increasingly shrinking, with more and more readers reading online rather than in the libraries, for there have appeared numerous netizens who write and publish online. I think it's hard to say whether or not the Internet will ruin or contrib- ute to the popularization of serious literature: a lot of print literature, chiefly serious literature, is likely to be published on the Internet, but although that means fewer books will be printed on paper, it also means that it will pos- sible for more and more readers to get access to serious literature, including translated world literature online. Since translated literature comprises a large part of the literary market, Internet writing might well contribute a bit to the popularization of world literature in China as well. But my concern in this article is the extent to which the Internet will help to popularize literature. Obviously, the emergence of the Internet in our daily lives provides us with a new way to communicate and express our feelings and opinions. As a global system of interconnected computer networks, the Internet con- nects billions of users (or their computers) worldwide by using the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). Thus, for most users, it is the first time that they have not been limited by space and time in communicating with others, and they now have the opportunity to know other people's (public or private) stories and share their experiences in just a matter of seconds. Speed changes everything and makes things go more smoothly in our lives. Not only do the younger generations like to communicate online, but even the older scholars are gradually taking interest in communicating through the Internet.