After Franz Kafka died in 1924, his novels and short stories were published in ways that downplayed both their author's roots in Prague and his engagement with Jewish tradition and language, so as to ...secure their place in the German literary canon. Now, nearly a century after Kafka began to create his fictions, Germany, Israel, and the Czech Republic lay claim to his legacy.Kafka's Jewish Languagesbrings Kafka's stature as a specifically Jewish writer into focus.
David Suchoff explores the Yiddish and modern Hebrew that inspired Kafka's vision of tradition. Citing the Jewish sources crucial to the development of Kafka's style, the book demonstrates the intimate relationship between the author's Jewish modes of expression and the larger literary significance of his works. Suchoff shows how "The Judgment" evokes Yiddish as a language of comic curse and examines how Yiddish, African American, and culturally Zionist voices appear in the unfinished novel,Amerika. In his reading ofThe Trial, Suchoff highlights the black humor Kafka learned from the Yiddish theater, and he interpretsThe Castlein light of Kafka's involvement with the renewal of the Hebrew language. Finally, he uncovers the Yiddish and Hebrew meanings behind Kafka's "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-Folk" and considers the recent legal case in Tel Aviv over the possession of Kafka's missing manuscripts as a parable of the transnational meanings of his writing.
Entre dos mundos Diop, Ndèye Khady
Guaraguao (Barcelona, Spain),
01/2024, Letnik:
27, Številka:
75
Journal Article
Si nos remitimos al enfoque psicoanalítico de Freud y Lacan, por ejemplo, advertimos que la representación de un animal permite revelar no solo la naturaleza latente en nuestro yo, sino que también ...contribuye a mostrar las pulsiones de las que surge. En efecto, la representación del animal ayuda, según el punto de vista psicoanalítico, a ver todas las fuerzas que nos gobiernan, empezando por la libido. Para ello, abordaremos las principales características de este animal, sin olvidar, a través de un enfoque sociocrítico y narratológico, por qué se le considera portador de sentido en Au-dessus des dunes. Franz Kafka, por ejemplo, como narrador en Description dun combat. Forschungen eines Hundes) adopta un estatus en su juicio sobre los beneficios sociales que implica pertenecer a la especie canina. En efecto, el escritor de Praga, aunque oculto, se presenta bajo esta apariencia, lo que permite al lector comprender fácilmente que el universo canino representado en su obra no es otra cosa que la sociedad humana y que el narrador mismo es Kafka. La presencia del animal en la literatura africana se explica, además, por la importancia que muchos negros conceden a la naturaleza. La convivencia y las relaciones hombre-animal, sobre las que volveremos, revelan, entre otras cosas, una dimensión ontologica del hombre, su bestialidad. Es cierto que este animal ocupa un lugar especial en la cultura occidental y ha sido estudiado a menudo en Europa, pero esto no sucede en Senegal. Aquí es donde se encuentran mis dominios, en estas hectáreas de arena fina donde reino sin oposición en una banda de perros vagabundos más o menos hambrientos, pero libres y poco serviles, y que se alimentan de las sobras que tiran los habitantes del pueblo cercano, y que beben agua del río, donde a veces se bañan (Camara, 2014, p. 7). Como poseedor de los datos relativos a un pasado de su vida que quiere compartir con nosotros, Néstor, el narrador autodiegético de Au-dessus des dunes, en su deseo de credibilidad, se ve obligado a revelar su verdadera naturaleza de perro mitad-hombremitad-animal, lo que explica su particular capacidad para entender el lenguaje de los humanos.
Lyrical, mysterious, and laden with symbolism, Franz Kafka's novels and stories have been translated into more than forty languages ranging from Icelandic to Japanese. InTransforming Kafka, Patrick ...O'Neill approaches these texts through the method he pioneered inPolyglot JoyceandImpossible Joyce, considering the many translations of each work as a single, multilingual "macrotext."
Examining three novels -The Trial,The Castle, andAmerica- and two short stories - "The Judgment" and "The Metamorphosis" - O'Neill offers comparative readings that consider both intertextual and intratextual themes. His innovative approach shows how comparing translations extends and expands the potential meanings of the text and reveals the subtle differences among the hundreds of translations of Kafka's work. A sophisticated analysis of the ways in which translation shapes, rearranges, and expands our understanding of literary works,Transforming Kafkais a unique approach to reading the works of a literary giant.
In Kafka and Wittgenstein, Rebecca Schuman undertakes the first ever book-length scholarly examination of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language alongside Franz Kafka’s prose fiction. In ...groundbreaking readings, she argues that although many readers of Kafka are searching for what his texts mean, in this search we are sorely mistaken. Instead, 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?— themselves presuppose a bigger delusion: that such questions can be asked in the first place. Drawing deeply on the entire range of Wittgenstein’s writings, Schuman cannily sheds new light on the enigmatic Kafka.
Die Studie geht von der Beobachtung aus, dass Franz Kafka als biographisch Daheimgebliebener seine Geburtsstadt Prag erst gegen Ende seines Lebens verließ, seine Texte jedoch seit jeher den ...literarischen Aufbruch in die Fremde verhandeln. In dieser Hinsicht untersucht sie den „Schloß“-Roman als ‚Contact Zone‘, als von asymmetrischen Machtverhältnissen seiner Partizipanten geprägten Raum inter- bzw. transkultureller Konfrontation.
On the night of September 22, 1912, Franz Kafka wrote his story "The Judgment," which came out of him "like a regular birth." This act of creation struck him as an unmistakable sign of his literary ...destiny. Thereafter, the search of many of his characters for the Law, for a home, for artistic fulfillment can be understood as a figure for Kafka’s own search to reproduce the ecstasy of a single night. In Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, the preeminent American critic and translator of Franz Kafka traces the implications of Kafka’s literary breakthrough. Kafka’s first concern was not his responsibility to his culture but to his fate as literature, which he pursued by exploring "the limits of the human." At the same time, he kept his transcendental longings sober by noting--with incomparable irony--their virtual impossibility.
How did Kafka become Kafka? This eagerly anticipated third and final volume of Reiner Stach's definitive biography of the writer answers that question with more facts and insight than ever before, ...describing the complex personal, political, and cultural circumstances that shaped the young Franz Kafka (1883-1924). It tells the story of the years from his birth in Prague to the beginning of his professional and literary career in 1910, taking the reader up to just before the breakthrough that resulted in his first masterpieces, including "The Metamorphosis." Brimming with vivid and often startling details, Stach's narrative invites readers deep inside this neglected period of Kafka's life. The book's richly atmospheric portrait of his German Jewish merchant family and his education, psychological development, and sexual maturation draws on numerous sources, some still unpublished, including family letters, schoolmates' memoirs, and early diaries of his close friend Max Brod.
The biography also provides a colorful panorama of Kafka's wider world, especially the convoluted politics and culture of Prague. Before World War I, Kafka lived in a society at the threshold of modernity but torn by conflict, and Stach provides poignant details of how the adolescent Kafka witnessed violent outbreaks of anti-Semitism and nationalism. The reader also learns how he developed a passionate interest in new technologies, particularly movies and airplanes, and why another interest-his predilection for the back-to-nature movement-stemmed from his "nervous" surroundings rather than personal eccentricity.
The crowning volume to a masterly biography, this is an unmatched account of how a boy who grew up in an old Central European monarchy became a writer who helped create modern literature.
