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family and his education, psychological development, and sexual maturation draws on numerous sources, some still unpublished, including family letters, schoolmates' memoirs, and early diaries of his close friend Max Brod.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.
In this Very Short Introduction, Ritchie Robertson provides the newcomer with an up-to-date and accessible examination of this fascinating author. Beginning with an examination of Kafka's life, he ...then goes on to discuss some of the major themes that emerge in Kafka's work, using his short story Metamorphosis as a recurring example. - ;'When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect ...' So begins Franz Kafka's most famous story Metamorphosis. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is among the most intriguing and influential writers of the twentieth century. During his lifetime he worked as a civil servant and published only a handful of short stories, the best known being The Transformation. All three of his novels, The Trial, The Castle, and The Man Who Disappeared America, were published after his death and helped to found Kafka's reputation as a uniquely perceptive interpreter of the twentieth. century. Kafka's fiction vividly evokes bizarre situations: a commercial traveller is turned into an insect, a banker is arrested by a mysterious court, a fasting artist starves to death in the name of art, a singing mouse becomes the heroine of her nation. Attending both to Kafka's crisis-ridden life and to the subtleties of his art, Ritchie Robertson shows how his work explores such characteristically modern themes as the place of the body in culture, the power of institutions over people, and the. possibility of religion after Nietzsche had proclaimed 'the death of God'. The result is an up-to-date and accessible portrait of a fascinating author which shows us ways to read and make sense of his perplexing and absorbing work. -.
This book-series, initiated in 1992, has an interdisciplinary orientation; it comprises research monographs, collections of essays and annotated editions from the 18th century to the present. The ...term German-Jewish literature refers to the literary work of Jewish authors writing in German to the extent that Jewish aspects can be identified in these. However, the image of Jews among non-Jewish authors, often determined by anti-Semitism, is also a factor in the history of German-Jewish relations as reflected in literature. This series provides an appropriate forum for research into the whole problematic area.
Nonhuman figures are ubiquitous in the work of Franz Kafka, from his early stories down to his very last one. Despite their prominence throughout his oeuvre, Kafka’s animal representations have been ...considered first and foremost as mere allegories of intrahuman matters. In recent years, the allegorization of Kafka’s animals has been poetically dismissed by Kafka’s commentators and politically rejected by posthumanist scholars. Such critique, however, has yet to inspire either an overarching or an interdiscursive account. This book aims to fill this lacuna. Positing animal stories as a distinct and significant corpus within Kafka’s entire poetics, and closely examining them in dialogue with both literary and posthumanist analysis, Kafka’s Zoopoetics critically revisits animality, interspecies relations, and the very human-animal contradistinction in the writings of Franz Kafka. Kafka’s animals typically stand at the threshold between humanity and animality, fusing together human and nonhuman features. Among his liminal creatures we find a human transformed into vermin (in “The Metamorphosis”), an ape turned into a human being (in “A Report to an Academy”), talking jackals (in “Jackals and Arabs”), a philosophical dog (in “Researches of a Dog”), a contemplative mole-like creature (in “The Burrow”), and indiscernible beings (in “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People”). Depicting species boundaries as mutable and obscure, Kafka creates a fluid human-animal space, which can be described as “humanimal.” The constitution of a humanimal space radically undermines the stark barrier between human and other animals, dictated by the anthropocentric paradigm. Through denying animalistic elements in humans, and disavowing the agency of nonhuman animals, excluding them from social life, and neutralizing compassion for them, this barrier has been designed to regularize both humanity and animality. The contextualization of Kafka's animals within posthumanist theory engenders a post-anthropocentric arena, which is simultaneously both imagined and very real.
This new translation includes Kafka's most famous story, The Metamorphosis, together with two other stories, The Judgement and In the Penal Colony, and Meditation and the autobiographical Letter to ...his Father. The edition includes a detailed introduction, notes, and other helpful items.
Kafka's Italian progeny Ziolkowski, Saskia Elizabeth
Kafka's Italian progeny,
2020, 2020, 2019-12-12
eBook
While many scholars of world literature view national literary traditions as resolved and stable, Kafka's Italian Progeny takes the fluid identity of the modern Italian tradition as an opportunity to ...reconsider its dimensions and influencers. Exploring a distinct but unexamined Kafkan tradition in modern Italian literature, it brings Italian literary works into larger debates and reorients the critical view of the Italian literary landscape. The book calls attention to the way Kafkan themes, narrative strategies, and formal experimentation appear in a range of Italian authors. Offering new perspectives on familiar figures, such as Italo Calvino, Italo Svevo, and Elena Ferrante, it also sheds light on some lesser-known authors, including Tommaso Landolfi, Paola Capriolo, and Lalla Romano. Using diverse approaches to explore thematic, generic, historical, and cultural connections between Kafka's works and those of Italian authors, the author argues for a new view of Italian literature that includes talking animals, parental bonds, modernist realism, literary detective novels, and lyrical microfiction. Whereas Kafka has been mobilized in discourses on minor and world literature, Kafka's Italian Progeny investigates the particular nature of the Italian reception of Kafka to reveal the richness and variety of modern Italian literature.
Introduction: narration and narratives in Kafka -- Progression, speed, and judgment in Kafka's "Das urteil" / James Phelan -- The human body and the human being in "Die verwandlung" / Anniken Greve ...-- "Lightning no longer flashes": Kafka's Chinese voice and the thunder of the great war / Benno Wagner -- The abandoned writing-desk: on Kafka's metanarratives, as exemplified by "Der heizer" / Gerhard Neumann -- Therese's story in "Der verschollene" / Gerhard Kurz -- The sense of an un-ending: the resistance to narrative closure in Kafka's "Das schloss" / J. Hillis Miller -- Starting in the middle: complications of narrative beginnings and progression in Kafka / Beatrice Sandberg -- The narrative beginning of Kafka's "In der strafkolonie" / Jakob Lothe -- Musical indirections in Kafka's Forschungen eines hundes / Stanley Corngold -- The dynamics of narration in betrachtung: "Das urteil," and Kafka's reflections on writing / Ronald Speirs
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