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.
Franz Kafka Kafka, Franz
2020, 2008, 2020-12-08
eBook
Franz Kafka: The Office Writings brings together, for the first time in English, Kafka's most interesting professional writings, composed during his years as a high-ranking lawyer with the largest ...Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in the Czech Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is commonly recognized as the greatest German prose writer of the twentieth century. It is less well known that he had an established legal career. Kafka's briefs reveal him to be a canny bureaucrat, sharp litigator, and innovative thinker on the social, political, and legal issues of his time. His official preoccupations inspired many of the themes and strategies of the novels and stories he wrote at night.These documents include articles on workmen's compensation and workplace safety; appeals for the founding of a psychiatric hospital for shell-shocked veterans; and letters arguing relentlessly for a salary adequate to his merit. In adjudicating disputes, promoting legislative programs, and investigating workplace sites, Kafka's writings teem with details about the bureaucracy and technology of his day, such as spa elevators in Marienbad, the challenge of the automobile, and the perils of excavating in quarries while drunk. Beautifully translated, with valuable commentary by two of the world's leading Kafka scholars and one of America's most eminent civil rights lawyers, the documents cast rich light on the man and the writer and offer new insights to lovers of Kafka's novels and stories.
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.
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.
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.
La Lettre au père de Franz Kafka est un document clinique tout à fait singulier, voire exceptionnel à plus d’un titre, tant du point de vue de la littérature que de celui de l’orientation subjective ...de son auteur. Cette orientation se dévoile ici et contribue à nous faire entrevoir l’intrication du troumatisme dans une nécessité d’écriture, nécessité mêlant avec férocité les dimensions du comique et du tragique afin de soutenir ce qui apparaît comme l’horizon du pire lorsque le père fait ravage. Cette nécessité d’écrire apparaît comme un traitement singulier de la honte et de la hantise qui marque irrémédiablement la vie de l’auteur. L’analyse de ces écrits dans cette perspective peut permettre au clinicien un repérage différentiel des concepts de trauma et de ravage.
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.
