Kafka's Work Research Articles

Plausible Primitives: Kafka and Jewish Primitivism

This article analyzes Kafka's works as an exemplar of Jewish primitivism. The eastern European Jew had, from the turn of the century, become increasingly aestheticized and anthropologized, a confluence that bespeaks the concurrent and intertwined development of anthropology and of a modernist fascination with those who were identified as the authentic bearers of culture. Eastern European Jews became subjects for the exploration of ‘authentic’ culture much like South Seas Islanders, with the crucial difference lying in their linguistic, ethnic, religious, and geographic propinquity to the German‐speaking Jews of central Europe; this propinquity created what I term a plausible primitivism, the central defining characteristic of Jewish primitivism. This transferal of the ethnographic object from far away to near at hand offered a new mode of primitivism that privileged the ethnographic encounter over formalist primitivism. As such, it brought primitivist discourses into the center of debates over identity and modernity among German Jews.

Domestic Photography and the Minor: Hawarden and the Aesthetics of Morris

“Yes I repeat that the chief source of art is man's pleasure in his daily necessary work, which expresses itself and is embodied in that work itself; nothing else can make the common surroundings o...

The Everyday's Fabulous Beyond: Nonsense, Parable, and the Ethics of the Literary in Kafka and Wittgenstein

This essay takes up the significance of Wittgenstein's philosophy for our understanding of literature (and vice versa) through a comparative reading of the stakes and aims of Kafka's and Wittgenstein's respective circa 1922 puzzle texts “Von den Gleichnissen” (“On Parables”) and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The essay builds upon the so-called resolute program of Wittgenstein interpretation developed by Cora Diamond, James Conant, and others, bringing its insights to bear on Kafka's perplexing work. The essay explores the ethical weight of these two writers' investment in the philosophical depth of riddles, irony, and parabolic and nonsensical expression as unorthodox modes of indirect instruction about ordinary language and world, the yearning for transcendence, and the failure to achieve it. Both demanding works deal with the ethical difference between “getting” the philosophical import of a story or joke and not getting it in the context of an examination of the relationship (or lack thereof) between the activities and difficulties of everyday life, on the one hand, and those of literary expression and/or spiritual or philosophical teaching, on the other. Both strive to open readers to experience — as revealed through everyday language — by leading us beyond the dichotomy of facticity and transcendence, away from the urge to transcend the limits of language, and toward a recognition of the possibility of seeing our ordinary dealing with things as presenting a face of significance that is at once linguistically meaningful and ethically valuable. The central aim of this discussion of Wittgenstein's Tractatus and “Lecture on Ethics” alongside Kafka's parable is to examine the ways in which Wittgenstein's philosophical outlook, writing, and method (shaped by his general attraction to the Book and book writing as well as by his reading of certain works of literature) are deeply relevant to literary studies, and particularly to our understanding of literary modernism.

How Did Kafka's Jewish Identity Influence His Works?

Kafka and his interpreters - Kafka's works are, undoubtedly, loaded with hidden symbols and meanings. A text like this calls for many interpretations, yet often enough; the interpreter uses his interpretation as a lever for his own ideas. Moreover, the more the interpreter - the more dangerous will his interpretation be. Therefore, in writing this paper I felt the need to stay well away from the works of certain interpreters, mainly Max Brod and Martin Buber.Obviously, no interpretative approach should be underestimated, yet one should not attempt to drop the whole weight of interpretation on a single point of view. Doing so, beyond mistaking and misleading others - will be a against Kafka, whose personality and writings are multi-dimensional, and abound in meanings. From the moment the multi-meaning of Kafka's writings is limited, their most important values are destroyed (Weidla, in: Kurzweil, 1973).About what I purport, and what I do not in this paper - in this work, being too short to contain the multitude of words and interpretations said and written about Kafka, I will not attempt to attribute the whole load of work to his Jewish identity and complex mental state, resulting from this identity.I do am not arguing that the ideas in my paper are the absolute truth. They are more of a point of view, which I find fascinating, when reading Kafka's works.I tried, intentionally, and as much as possible, to reduce the amount of bibliographic origins, and chose to cite, corroborate and base my paper on the initial source - Kafka's books and diaries, not out of disrespect for the interpretations, but rather because of my belief that this is my duty to the writer and his works.In addition, I wish to examine how Kafka's Jewish identity helped him capture so acutely and profoundly the problem of the modern man.

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.

Milan Kundera and Franz Kafka - How Not to Forget Everydayness

Purpose of the article is to show that while in fundamental constitutional questions we are still attentive to our past, in everyday legal cases we can forget more likely. In my opinion, in case of the post-communist countries it is very dangerous to forget the Past because we have nothing other than our memories. To forget means either to be exposited the danger of return to the system as it was or to transform our legal praxis into a depersonalized system. Methodology/Methods In this article I want to analyze two decisions of Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic and compare them with situation described in early works of Milan Kundera (The Joke; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). His work reflecting the past everydayness in communist Czechoslovakia can be used as a good example of the analyses of forgetting. Very similar inspirations we can find in work of Franz Kafka (The Trial) or even better in Milan Kundera's interpretation of Kafka's work. The scientific aim of this article is to show that although the literature represents different conception of knowledge when this knowledge is compared with legal knowledge we can gain parallels that describe the law rooted in culture and society. Conclusions of this article show that on one side we face reminding of our Past in decisions regarding politically considerable cases. On the other side we face the oblivion: In cases at constitutional level dealing with everydayness in legal praxis we can find rather shift to formal interpretation without any reference to our past. The result can be Kafkaesque legal system without any signs of living people.

Reassessing Willa Muir

The critical elision of Willa Muir's influence on her and her husband's translations of Kafka's work (the first English-language translations, made in 1930–1948) raises the question of whether this results from her gender and the gendered, feminized role of translation and the colonized translator. Muir's archive, including her journals, private writings in Scots and an unpublished novel, Mrs Muttoe and the Top Storey, about a female translator translating a fictionalized Kafka, reveal a translator acutely aware of sexual, cultural and linguistic asymmetry. Employing Luise von Flotow's notion of the “translator-effect”; Steven Yao's notion of the modernist, gendered symbiosis between writing and translation; and recent writing on Scots vernacular translation, this article argues that Willa Muir was the predominant translator in the couple, that her feminism and her status as a native Scots speaker influenced the Kafka translations, and that the translations should be reassessed accordingly.

Religious Dogs in Nietzsche and KafKa

Albeit grotesque, the idea of religious dogs helps us to understand and criticize the power relations inherent in religion. The first part of the present paper analyzes two notes from Nietzsche's Nachlass that envisage an analogy between the relations of dogs to humans and of humans to God. Placed in their historical context of Darwinism and naturalistic conceptions of culture, these notes shed light on Nietzsche's critique of religious attitudes to domination. The second part — a reading of Kafka's 'Forschungen eines Hundes' — situates the analogy between the dog-human and human-God relationships at the centre of the story's irony. Kafka's use of the analogy differs from Nietzsche's by emphasizing the cognitive dimension of religious aspirations and giving less weight to the subordination to a more powerful agency. In the context of Kafka's work as a whole, however, the story suggests an approach to the relations between power and religion that is incompatible with Nietzsche's understanding of life as will to power.

Spaces Stretch Inward: Intersections between Architecture and Minor Literature

This essay offers an analysis of the architectural environment of the Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza, examined through a comparison of Deleuze and Guattari's “minor literature” interpreting Kafka's work.

»Betkunst« Schauspiel, Sprachreflexion und Religion beim frühen Kafka

"Art of praying": Play, linguistic reflection and religion in Kafka's early works | How do gesture, linguistic reflection and theatrical narrative relate to religious rituals and texts in Kafka's early work? The present article examines this question through an analysis of Kafka's Conversation with the Supplicant in the context of fin-de-siecle Kunstreligion, as well as aestheticism and its critique. It argues that in the early Kafka art is neither a form of nor a substitution for religion but its areligious imitation

Kafka, Critical Theory, Dialectical Theology: Adorno's Case against Hans‐Joachim Schoeps

ABSTRACTTheodor Adorno derived from his reading of Kafka some of the central assumptions that inform the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. He opposed theological Kafka interpretations in general, and in particular rejected Hans‐Joachim Schoeps's reading of Kafka in the context of Karl Barth's dialectical theology. Adorno and Schoeps thus came to exemplify the dichotomy with which we still characterise the early reception of Kafka's work as either secular (sociological or political) or theological and religious.The disintegration of religion as a comprehensive social system in twentieth‐century Germany means that writers can agree with traditional theology and religion in some regards while opposing them in others. This article argues that any unqualified adoption of the dichotomy between the secular and the religious is detrimental to our understanding of both Kafka's work and its early reception. First, the article outlines some of the major discrepancies in Kafka's heterogeneous engagements with religion. Second, it places Adorno's rejection of Schoeps's interpretation in the political context of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Finally, it compares Adorno's notion of ‘inverse theology’ with Schoeps's inversion of salvation history. Throughout, the article aims to ascertain the differences as well as the underlying commonalities between Adorno's and Schoeps's Kafka reception.Wesentliche Richtlinien der Kritischen Theorie der Frankfurter Schule verdanken sich der Kafka‐Rezeption Adornos, die theologische Deutungen Kafkas im allgemeinen abweist und insbesondere Hans‐Joachim Schoeps’ Verständnis von Kafkas Werk im Kontext der Dialektischen Theologie Karl Barths verwirft. Adorno und Schoeps repräsentieren die Pole einer Dichotomie, mit der noch heute die Beiträge der frühen Kafka‐Rezeption entweder als soziologisch und politisch oder als theologisch und religiös klassifiziert werden.Die Desintegration religiösen Lebens in der deutschen Gesellschaft des 20. Jahrhunderts bringt es mit sich, dass Schriftsteller in jeweils bestimmten Hinsichten traditionelle Theologie und Religion verwerfen und übernehmen können. Der vorliegende Beitrag argumentiert, dass jede nicht‐spezifizierte Vorstellung einer Dichotomie von religiösem und weltlichem Leben und Denken aufgegeben werden muss, wenn wir Kafkas Werk und seine frühe Rezeption verstehen wollen. Der Beitrag skizziert zunächst zentrale Diskrepanzen in Kafkas heterogenen Bezugnahmen auf Religiöses. Im Anschluss stellt er Adornos Schoeps‐Kritik in den politischen Kontext von Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust. Wie der Beitrag als ganzer soll der abschließende Vergleich der Begiffe ‘inverse Theologie’ (Adorno) und ‘Unheilsgeschichte’ (Schoeps) ein angemessenes Verständnis der Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten in der Kafka‐Deutung der beiden Autoren ermöglichen.

EL PROCESO, KAFKA, AND THE COMIC NOVEL: ANA MARÍA SHUA'S SOY PACIENTE AND THE FEAR OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM

This article examines the role of comedy and the influence of Kafka in Ana María Shua's comic novel Soy paciente (1980). Using Northrop Frye's rubric of comedy as a point of departure, it traces the way in which Shua's text, like Kafka's work, simultaneously inscribes and distorts the traditional utopian themes of comedy: identity acquisition and social resolution. The aim is to relate the distortions to the novel's socio-historical context of El proceso by referring to Erich Fromm's observations on the effect Fascist regimes have on concepts such as social and individual identity. The article also exposes the correlation between Shua's cultural dependency (on Kafkaesque/European creative paradigms) and the novel's oppressive cultural/political context.

Project for a Film by Kafka

This short document, appearing for the first time in English translation, concerns the prospects of a made-for-television cultural mini-series inspired by select episodes in Kafka's works. A window is opened onto Guattari's curatorial ambitions, cinematic projects, and theory of minor cinema, bringing into focus how he translated theoretical preoccupations into the cultural sector with reference to diverse semiotic media.

An Inhumanly Wise Shame

In Kafka's work, Benjamin detects a gesture of shame, which he characterizes as historico-philosophic (geschichtsphilosophisch). He considers Kafka's gesture of shame to be philosophic in its opposition to myth, which is closure concerning history. In its elaboration of Kafka's gesture, moreover, Benjamin's analysis itself becomes a gesture of shame and thus somehow “literary.” This does not detract from the notion that the gesture—in Kafka's work and in Benjamin's criticism—remains philosophic. Kafka's literary work is philosophic in shaming mythic interpretations of it; Benjamin's philosophic criticism continues this gesture by advancing shame about mythic tendencies either in the work or in its reception. Without pathos, Kafka presents astonished shame at mythic human order and is attentive to exceptions to, deviations from, such order. Benjamin's criticism continues the latter attentiveness, but the attentiveness, the philosophic element in Kafka's literature, is also betrayed by Benjamin in some respects.

Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine (review)

Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine, by Iris Bruce. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. 262 pp. $65.00. Iris Bruce has presented us with an important book about Kafka and Zionism, which makes it possible for readers in English gain the most comprehensive understanding date of his personal and literary relationship the ideology and cultural expressions of this Jewish-national movement. Her stated goals are to lay out the formative influences (family and personal history, historical events, readings, cultural interests, and activities) that led Kafka become engaged in Zionist activities and compare and contrast his practical, cultural Zionism with the beliefs and convictions of other contemporary Zionists (p. 4). In fact, she accomplishes much more than these aims. A fair amount of scholarly attention has been given the topic of Kafka and Zionism over the years, and Iris Bruce draws on, and acknowledges her indebtedness to, die scholarly foundation which has been laid in the past. Despite the efforts of many scholars, Kafka's very strong Jewish and Zionist interests seem be known only a limited readership or appreciated by a small group of specialists. Why this resistance continues be the case requires separate consideration. The various Jewish and Zionist contexts of his life and even when noted cursorily by representatives of the vast empire of the Kafka industry, have been neither sufficiently explicated nor integrated into the numerous biographical accounts and ambitious studies of his writings and career. In any case, Bruces study does not rely solely on previous scholarship as much as it extends its reach considerably, adding a good amount what has been known until now. Even in the case of Kafka's relationship the Yiddish Theater or Hugo Bergmann and his cultural Zionism, as well as its indebtedness M. J. Berdyczewski, Bruce adds palpably what we already know. I think it is fair say that this study is the first attempt present a comprehensive, overall picture of this aspect of Kafka's life and works, and it is certainly the most learned. Bruce charts the process and progress of Kafka's Jewish and Zionist education, and she has followed in his footsteps some extent. Having read the books he did or the published lectures of those public lectures he attended, as well as the correspondence and secondary literature, she is largely successful in reconstructing the pathways and trajectory of Kafka's Zionist orbit. She knows mote about it, including hardly accessible and intimate details, than anyone else has demonstrated so far. Her knowledge of Judaism, the Jewish textual tradition, Jewish life, Zionism, antisemitism, Chassidism, German-Jewish literature, Yiddish literature and more, in relation Kafka and Prague, is quite extensive and impressive. Bruces basic strategy is delineate the Zionist discourses characteristic of Prague and Central Europe during Kafka's lifetime, within the context of the plethora of cultural discourses common this same cultural space where Kafka perfected and negotiated his expressive and literary talents. Bruces fundamental thesis is that the Zionist discourses were privileged in Kafka's scheme of things, and they played a central role in terms of Kafka's life, consciousness, and activities, but also regarding his writing. Bruce argues that Kafka's works develop and represent a counterdiscourse the various discourses which constitute or inform his that is, even a counterdiscourse cultural Zionism itself. In addition providing readers with many fascinating biographical tidbits and intimate details of Kafka's Jewish and Zionist connections, Bruce integrates them insightfully into her readings of his writings, including work published during his lifetime (for example in the Prague Zionist newspaper Selbstwehr or in Martin Buber's Der Jude), but also including Kafka's posthumous his correspondence, his diaries, etc. …

Wirklichkeit und Literatur: Strategien dokumentarischen Schreibens in der Weimarer Republik by Matthias UeckerRealistisches Schreiben in der Weimarer Republik. (Schriften der Ernst-Toller-Gesellschaft, 5) by Sabine Kyora, Stefan Neuhaus

602 Reviews insights into the relationship between literature and media technology and should open further avenues for reading Kafka's work in the context ofmedia studies. University of Miami Markus Zisselsberger Wirklichkeit und Literatur: Strategien dokumentarischen Schreibens inderWeimarer Republik. ByMatthias Uecker. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang. 2007. 567 pp. 87.20; ?51. ISBN 978-3-03911-057-5. Realistisches Schreiben in der Weimarer Republik. Ed. by Sabine Kyora and Stefan Neuhaus. (Schriften der Ernst-Toller-Gesellschaft, 5) Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann. 2006. 340 pp. 39.80. ISBN 978-3-8260-3390-2. The issue of realism in literaturewas far from new in theGermany of the 1920s, but it was debated with particular intensity in thatperiod for reasons which are clearly connected to the circumstances of the time. 'Sachlichkeit', with itswide range of semantic resonances, became a focal term fordiscussions about attitudes to lifeand political issues in thewake of the First World War, aswell as forconceptions ofwhat cultural activity and artistic representation ought to be about. In a literary context this trendwas associated with a complex and ideologically inflected proliferation of programmatic statements as well as a strong tendency among younger authors to favour documentary approaches towriting.While thepractice of documentary writ ing continued during the 1930s, not least as an instrument of political propaganda both forand against National Socialism, theprogrammatic positions associated with Neue Sachlichkeit were vehemently challenged from a variety of perspectives from the late 1920s onwards, and the debate about them had effectivelyexhausted itself by the time theNazi regimewas installed in 1933. Matthias Ueckers book conducts a methodical review of the issues associated with Neue Sachlichkeit as a literary phenomenon. It closely examines the terms of the debate about documentary writing and its role in challenging traditional conceptions of literature,and itgives thorough accounts of the impact of documen tary approaches on the plays and novels as well as on the literary reportage of the Weimar period. It also relates these phenomena to parallel developments in film, in the production of illustrated books, and in journalism. In places the exposition of key ideas isperhaps over-dependent on a narrow range of authors (Egon Erwin Kisch, Erik Reger, Siegfried Kracauer, and Joseph Roth are particularly favoured). But Ueckers close attention to the precise nuance ofmany aspects of the polemics and thepractice ofwriters in the 1920s makes itthe sort of book that scholars would be well advised to consult in futurewhen checking their own thinking about what was really at stake in the literarydebates of the time. The book does, however, have limitations. The absence of an index makes it difficult to use in a targeted way; and given its focus on factors that prompted debate about the nature and function of literature, it isunfortunate that it makes no reference to thework ofHarro Segeberg on how authors of the period interacted creatively with such new media as radio (Segeberg, Literatur imMedienzeitalter: Literatur, Technik und Medien seit 1914 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchge MLR, 104.2, 2009 603 sellschaft, 2003)). But themost serious constraint on the effectiveness of Uecker's analysis arises from his choice ofmethodological orientation. Some twelve pages of his opening chapter, inwhich he reviews possible theoretical approaches to his subject, are given over to an admirably cogent account of the limitations ofNiklas Luhmann's systems theory as an instrument foranalysing the functions of literature (Luhmann speaks of art ingeneral as a 'system', rather than literature inparticular; when applied to literature,his thinking is liable to generate tautological definitions; it makes no allowance for the role of the author as an individual; and itsfundamental conception of a system stabilizing itself 'autopoietically' in response to challenges from its environment is of limited value when considering the nature of literature as a system of communication with open and diffuse boundaries towards other domains of social activity). And yet Uecker cleaves to the notion of literature as a 'system' defending itself against encroachment by other 'systems'. The reason for this appears to be that themodel of 'literature' he has adopted is firmlybased on the notion of 'truth' rather than 'reality' as the hallmark of literarywriting, as arti culated in the aesthetic thought of Schiller and Hegel. A sense of binary opposition between thismodel of'literature...

Melancholy and Parapraxis: Rewriting History in Benjamin and Kafka

I. Parable Walter Benjamin's 1934 essay on Franz Kafka is guided throughout by the diversions of various parables: from Kafka himself, from Jewish and Chinese folklore, and perhaps most significantly, by the story on Potemkin taken from Aleksandr Pushkin that opens the essay. These parables operate in a manner akin to that of the mosaic of quotations that Benjamin pursued in the Trauerspiel study and The Arcades Project, which attempt to allow the work to develop autonomously and contin- gently through the differential effects that each new citation provides, thus enabling the scholar to uncover previously overlooked aspects of the work by enabling it to reveal itself anew. The motivation for this programme lies in the hermeneutic difficulties of bringing out the truth of a particular work, that is, in the problem of interpretation. And the fact that Benjamin responds to Kafka's work by following Kafka's own inclination towards parable is significant, for it not only recognises Kafka's pre-eminent significance as a writer; interpreter of texts but in doing so also brings out the peculiar status of the parable as a means of interpretation. As the term implies, the parable is that which lies alongside (para) the main text, and so its place as an interpretive tool is constrained by the fact that its own existence as a text to be interpreted may lead to a digression in which we are drawn away from the main text and into a parabolic discussion, turning from one diversion to another. This aspect of the parable is what appealed to Kafka, insofar as the parable suspends its own significance as a tool by refusing to be interpreted

Figures d'exclus, figures exclues chez franz kafka et samuel beckett

Ill seen, ill said, ill done, ill written, ill loved, ill heard. Against the old style, whose happy days are gone, Beckett's "figures" – that is, ways of being and saying – shape a language that deliberately denies all social and speech conventions. Excluded characters and figures behind the language assert themselves against all laws and rules. This article intends to show this feature while justifying the comparison between Beckett's and Kafka's works: we will also underline a difference between Kafka's "trial" – and process – of language and the reluctance of Beckett's characters.

Plot Taxonomies and Intentionality

Plot Taxonomies and Intentionality Jon Adams Ever popular among the various topics occupying non-academic conversations about literature—such as the identity of the real author of the plays attributed to "Shakespeare"—is the notion that there exists only a finite number of storylines, and that all the stories we know are only ever complications or rehearsals of these few, elementary plots. What is the status of that claim? The issue gains a renewed relevance in light of literary criticism's recent interest in the possibilities of employing evolutionary psychology as a means of naturalising literary study, but interest in plot taxonomies stretches a long way back. Why might we seek to categorise plots into a finite taxonomy? And what are the implications of the claim if true? Organising literature into any classificatory scheme is an attempt to achieve something like the coherence that the natural sciences have achieved—in chemistry and physics with the composition of the periodic table, and in biology with Linnaean classification. Much of science's epistemic prestige is rooted in the enormous success with which they have organised and categorised their subject of study. In searching for mechanism and pattern, the natural sciences proceed confidently from the belief that those mechanisms and patterns exist to be discovered, and that (relatively) simple rules underlie the manifest complexity of natural phenomena. Unfortunately, the study of literary fiction has no such security. There are two senses here in which we can talk of literature being patterned. At the micro-level, we have the question of whether individual works can be thought of as internally patterned. Usually, this type of patterning is easy enough to establish and recognise, and something the author is (or ought to be) in a good position to control. But, of course, internal [End Page 102] structures are not always conspicuous, and readers faced with an overtly complex text, like Pound's Cantos, or Finnegans Wake, have no guarantee that there is sense to be made of it. Surface complexity may shield a profound and subtle architecture, or the work may be as unstructured, fragmentary, and chaotic as it initially appears. A frustrated Wayne C. Booth draws attention to the problem: "One can't be sure that Finnegans Wake is not a great novel; perhaps someday readers will discover that the complex structure they now dream of and quarrel about is a realizable structure, an experienced structure. I doubt it, but it may happen. Until then, each new intricacy discovered ... reveals precisely nothing more than that: a new intricacy."1 What's missing is a conceptual centre around which overall coherence might be achieved from what had seemed to be unconnected parts. Even so, if this sort of centre cannot be found in the individual work, it may yet obtain between works. In other words, The Cantos or Finnegans Wake may yet occupy nodal roles in a larger system, within which they acquire a previously unrecognized unity and order. This type of organization is something the individual author is obviously in a much less suitable position to control. Nonetheless, mapping out this larger, macro-level order is a task that literary criticism might want to take on. There is the example Borges uses of how Kafka's work retrospectively confers a familial similarity upon previously unconnected works. The quality of being "Kafkaesque" is the only thing common to the pieces, but was not apparent (or rather—the paradox that excites Borges—did not exist) prior to Kafka's writing.2 This is the second sense in which literature might be thought of as patterned; that is, not within works, but across them. On the larger scale, is it possible that literature as a whole could be understood as patterned? The notion that literature can be understood "as a whole," and its corollary, that a literature so understood would submit to taxonomical classification, is an enduring one. Anthropologists and art historians have long acknowledged that there appear to be recurring themes, motifs, and commonalities across world cultures, and consequently, commonalities among the narratives those cultures construct and consume. Cataloguing these similarities has produced a variety of classificatory systems. In the mid-nineteenth century, German scholar Adolf...

Reading Kafka's Trial Politically: Justice–Law–Power

This article offers a political reading of Franz Kafka's posthumous work The Trial. In this novel, the main protagonist (Joseph K.) is subject to an arrest and trial conducted by the ambiguous authority of a shadowy court and its officials. This article explores Joseph K.'s experience of being subject to the Law, and relates this to our own understanding and experience of political subjectivity in modern times. K.'s doomed search for order through a ‘permanent resolution’ of his case is related to the modern desire for order: Specifically, the desire for both philosophical and political frameworks that provide narratives or certainty. Here modernity is understood to be characterized by an anxiety brought about by a crisis in authorship and authority. The article then considers K.'s desire for justice and the Law, and his entanglement with the power of the court, as analogous to the modern experience of the triad of justice–law–power, which is subsumed under the banner of ‘sovereignty’. In particular, the article explores K.'s inability to locate, read, or fix the Law; a problem that is also reflected in the aporia of sovereignty as justice–law–power. K.'s experience alerts us to the contradictions in the triad justice–law–power; contradictions that occur as although each member of the triad is dependent upon the other two, each member of the triad also seeks to exclude or deny this dependency. Thus, read politically, K.'s struggle in The Trial can be seen as a reflection of the modern struggle with sovereignty as the triad justice–law–power, and the impasse that K. reaches is also the impasse that modernity has reached.