This article describes how Franz Kafka's correspondence with the Czech journalist and translator Milena Jesenská, from 1920 to 1923, documents the development of his illness, his fear of physical ...intercourse, and his consequent reliance on writing. Writing is exploited in this epistolary affair to replace both physical presence and physical love. Simply stated, writing negates the body in this correspondence. The ensuing erasure of the body leads to a dim mode of bodily presence, a ghostly one. Kafka’s Letters to Milena are read as a rich hunting ground for psychoanalytical and feminist interpretations of the (female) body and female sexuality. It is the mystery of femininity that Kafka tries to solve in the course of this correspondence. Sexuality and the female body are rendered in this epistolary love as a reviled “dark continent” that should be sublimated in favor of the symbolic realm of writing. Of special importance at this stage of Kafka’s life as a tubercular is his conception of the diabolical nature of his writing, an issue that has received very little critical attention. A man living close to death chooses for himself a life of seclusion and introversion from human relations and withdraws into a ghostly existence. The body that deteriorates into a ghostly presence finds its counterpart in "demonic" letter writing that conjures up physical presence in Kafka's relationship with Milena. The first section of this article introduces Letters to Milena in context. Section two presents a reading of the letters informed by psychoanalysis and feminism, and section three focuses on the final letters and presents Kafka as a “ghostly lover.
The purpose and goal of this case study was to: Better understand Spanish as a Heritage Language. Document positive, neutral, or negative influences of a Dual Language immersion program on the ...Heritage Language development of an HL participant versus typical HL development embodied by participation in mainstream English only education program. Examine the potential role, if any, of academic pedagogy in supporting HL maintenance and/or development.
This paper is an analysis of four literary works by the authors Kôbô Abe and Franz Kafka. Using the theory of the philosophy of action as the theoretical background, the paper explores the different ...acts the characters try to commit. Through the analysis of their action, the author of the article is trying to understand the motivation for the acts themselves, while also considering the wider social environment and how it might have affected the success or failure of the acts. The paper includes two of Abe?s short stories, the first one being the story ?Beyond the Curve?, the English translation of which has been published in the collection by the same name and was translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. The other short piece by Abe has not been translated to English as of yet, thus the English quotations of the work used in this paper will have been done by the author of the paper. The title of the story can be roughly translated as ?The Raccoon dog of the Tower of Babel?. The pieces by Kafka which are analyzed in the paper are ?The Burrow? and ?The Judgement?. While the authors come from different sides of the planet, with different backgrounds and quite different influences, there are certain similarities in their approaches to the characters in their work. This paper explores to what degree the environment of the characters is to blame for their ultimate demise or victory, through the exploration of their willingness to act according to their own capabilities.
An important claim made for second-generation accounts of cognition is that they help solve the problem of dualism, which arguably remains unchallenged in much literary criticism. Kafka's short story ...“Ein Hungerkunstler” (A Hunger Artist) is about a profoundly embodied experience of (unsuccessfully) denying embodiment: fasting to death. With this text's cognitive realism as my focal point, I use insights from second-generation cognitive science (which acknowledges the embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended nature of human cognition), including research on eating disorders and starvation, to provide purchase on two traditional literary-critical concerns: thematic interpretation and paradox. I also suggest that a first-person perspective which acknowledges the complexities of individual real-world embodiment may sometimes enrich cognitive literary studies. This combined first-person and second-generation methodology can help us recognize that for the real people who read our scholarship and learn from us, the dangers of dualism are ethically as well as interpretively profound.
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