Kafka's Other Prague: Writings from the Czechoslovak Republicexamines Kafka's late writings from the perspective of the author's changing relationship with Czech language, culture, and literature-the ...least understood facet of his meticulously researched life and work.Franz Kafka was born in Prague, a bilingual city in the Habsburg Empire. He died a citizen of Czechoslovakia. Yet Kafka was not Czech in any way he himself would have understood. He could speak Czech, but, like many Prague Jews, he was raised and educated and wrote in German. Kafka critics to date have had little to say about the majority language of his native city or its "minor literature," as he referred to it in a 1913 journal entry.Kafka's Other Pragueexplains why Kafka's later experience of Czech language and culture matters.Bringing to light newly available archival material, Anne Jamison's innovative study demonstrates how Czechoslovakia's founding and Kafka's own dramatic political, professional, and personal upheavals altered his relationship to this "other Prague." It destabilized Kafka's understanding of nationality, language, gender, and sex-and how all these issues related to his own writing.Kafka's Other Praguejuxtaposes Kafka's German-language work with Czechoslovak Prague's language politics, intellectual currents, and print culture-including the influence of his lover and translator, the journalist Milena Jesenská-and shows how this changed cultural and linguistic landscape transformed one of the great literary minds of the last century.
Franz Kafka’s “Der Bau” is, among others, a story about dwelling and real estate. This essay makes visible how Kafka’s late fragment considers aspects of law, narration, and metaphor in order to ...establish a (bourgeois) form of property. The character of this proprietary order is explored in the text. Particularly the often-neglected framework of property that Kafka assigns to the burrow and its monologuing resident reveals a connection to a well-known problem in Kafka’s literature, namely the problem of the institution. The reading of Kafka’s “Der Bau” therefore becomes – also in dialogue with aspects of Kant’s philosophy of law – a categorical contribution to the (metaphorical) institution of property itself.
Scharf überwachte Kommunikation Mertelsmann, Olaf
Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas,
04/2015, Letnik:
63, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Eine mögliche Hypothese wäre, dass die Zensur letztlich gescheitert sei, weil sich Informationen oder auch Kunst doch nur recht schwer unterdrücken lassen. Diese führten die Bemühungen des Zensors ...mitunter geradezu ins Absurde, und staatliche Medien befanden sich immer wieder in einem Wettlauf mit ausländischen Radio- oder Fernsehsendern. Wie in anderen sozialistischen Staaten wurde die Existenz der Zensur in der DDR nicht zugegeben.
Originally published in 1985. Beasts of the Modern Imagination explores a specific tradition in modern thought and art: the critique of anthropocentrism at the hands of "beasts"—writers whose works ...constitute animal gestures or acts of fatality. It is not a study of animal imagery, although the works that Margot Norris explores present us with apes, horses, bulls, and mice who appear in the foreground of fiction, not as the tropes of allegory or fable, but as narrators and protagonists appropriating their animality amid an anthropocentric universe. These beasts are finally the masks of the human animals who create them, and the textual strategies that bring them into being constitute another version of their struggle. The focus of this study is a small group of thinkers, writers, and artists who create as the animal—not like the animal, in imitation of the animal—but with their animality speaking. The author treats Charles Darwin as the founder of this tradition, as the naturalist whose shattering conclusions inevitably turned back on him and subordinated him, the rational man, to the very Nature he studied. Friedrich Nietzsche heeded the advice implicit in his criticism of David Strauss and used Darwinian ideas as critical tools to interrogate the status of man as a natural being. He also responded to the implications of his own animality for his writing by transforming his work into bestial acts and gestures. The third, and last, generation of these creative animals includes Franz Kafka, the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, and D. H. Lawrence. In exploring these modern philosophers of the animal and its instinctual life, the author inevitably rebiologizes them even against efforts to debiologize thinkers whose works can be studied profitably for their models of signification.
Before Identity represents the first attempt to provide a comprehensive examination of the methodological ground of Japan studies. At its most basic level, the field presupposes the immediate ...empirical existence of an entity known as the "Japanese people" or "Japanese culture, " from which it then carves out its various objects of inquiry. Richard F. Calichman attempts to show that this presupposition is itself ineluctably bound up with modern forms of knowledge formation, thereby enlarging the scope of what is meant by modernity. In this way, he aims to bring about a heightened level of theoretical-critical vigilance in the field. Calichman explores the methodological commitments implied or expressed in the work of a range of writers and scholars—Murakami Haruki, Komori Y?ichi, Harry Harootunian, Tomi Suzuki, Alan Tansman, and Dennis Washburn—and how such commitments have shaped and limited the field. If theoretical issues in Japan studies are not subjected to this sort of in-depth scrutiny, Calichman argues, then the field will continue to remain ghettoized relative to other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, which have typically been more receptive to conceptual discourse. By showing that scholarly inquiry must begin not at the level of the object but rather at the more fundamental level of methodology, Calichman aims to introduce a greater degree of theoretical rigor to the discipline of Japan studies as a whole.
Like the sinister gatekeeper in Kafka's parable Before the Law, who bars the traveller entry to a gate that is specifically for him. Death supervenes before he can enter. 2 Most patients come to GPs ...with a problem rather than a solution.
Kafka's Zoopoetics is the first extensive account of animals and human-animal relations in the work of Franz Kafka. The book appeals to a broad audience, including scholars and students of ...Comparative Literature, German Studies, Cultural Studies, and Human-Animal Studies. Kafka’s pivotal role in world literature cannot be overestimated. Exploring the multidimensional relations between humans and animals, the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of Human-Animal Studies intertwines political and environmental critical paradigms, which are at the core of the contemporary intellectual discussion.
Abstract
Max Brod’s writing about Franz Kafka is one of the much-debated biographical undertakings of the 20th century, whose impacts still occupy literary scholars. Max Brod himself as well as his ...own extensive literary and journalistic-essayistic oeuvre is hardly known anymore, and this is also true for the numerous Kafka editions and contributions. Yet Brod’s interpretation of his friend has a life of its own and continues to have a subcutaneous effect. Until his own death in December 1968, Brod attended to his friend’s work with both devotion and appropriation, creating a Kafka cosmos in which he had assigned himself a key position. This constellation thus suggests a particularly close interweaving of autobiographical and biographical writing, which is the focus of this article.
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