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.
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
This paper presents a close encounter between the literary works of Franz Kafka and a core topic in organizational theories of power, namely the participation of subjects in their own ...subjectification. In discussing ‘In the Cathedral’, the penultimate chapter of The Trial by Franz Kafka, the paper develops three central aspects of Kafka’s text: reflexivity as a form of entanglement with power, self-slander complementing formal involvement, and humour as a form of freedom. These aspects are mirrored against the example of performance evaluation to complement and enrich the theoretical debate about subjectification more generally. The paper and its contributions serve as a corrective to approaches that overemphasize either the possibilities of resistance, for example through reflexivity, or the impotence of the subject in the face of power.
On ‘Halt!’ and On ‘on’ Liska, Vivian; North, Paul
Performance research,
06/2021, Volume:
26, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this piece, two critics respond to each other about Kafka's brief tale Up in the Gallery. Vivian Liska explores several possible readings of the story correlated with the word ‘Halt!’—its key ...moment of interruption. She suggests that Kafka calls a halt to straightforwardly political and existentialist interpretations, based as they are on false antitheses, which, she claims, the story performatively undermines. She wonders if this necessarily ends up in a mere literature of intensities or if this subversive effect on thinking in dichotomies constitutes an intervention in the world. Paul North argues that the title, Auf der Galerie, should be read as a mode of being roughly equivalent to the spectator position. He suggests that the tale belongs to Kafka's critiques of the European onto-theological landscape, where the one continually spectates the suffering of the other.
A series of disruptive, unnerving sounds haunts the fictional writings of Franz Kafka. These include the painful squeak in Gregor Samsa's voice, the indeterminate whistling of Josefine the singer, ...the relentless noise in The Burrow, and telephonic disturbances in The Castle. In Kafka and Noise, Kata Gellen applies concepts and vocabulary from film theory to Kafka's works in order to account for these unsettling sounds. Rather than try to decode these noises, Gellen explores the complex role they play in Kafka's larger project.
Kafka and Noise offers a method for pursuing intermedial research in the humanities—namely, via the productive misapplication of theoretical tools, which exposes the contours, conditions, and expressive possibilities of the media in question. This book will be of interest to scholars of modernism, literature, cinema, and sound, as well as to anyone wishing to explore how artistic and technological media shape our experience of the world and the possibilities for representing it.
This article compares two encounters on trams: a scene from Ruth Klüger's weiter leben and Franz Kafka's 'Der Fahrgast'. It suggests that narrative spaces are performative and narrative time ...complicates performances of identity. Both scenes construct apparent dichotomies between male and female, old and young, subject and object, binaries that are made ambiguous by the topography of theatricalization and cinema. The article introduces the concepts of 'spatial' and 'temporal' concertinas, whereby shifts in perspective alter power dynamics. The analysis suggests that the depiction of bodies, space, and time offers insight into aspects of identity and subjectivity that otherwise remain hidden.
Philip Weinstein explores the modernist commitment to unknowing by addressing the work of three supreme experimental writers: Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner. In their novels, the ...narrative props that support the drama of coming to know are refused. When space turns uncanny rather than lawful, when time ceases to be linear and progressive, objects and others become unfamiliar. So does the subject seeking to know them. Weinstein argues that modernist texts work, by way of surprise and arrest, to subvert the familiarity and narrative progression intrinsic to realist fiction. Rather than staging the drama of coming to know, they stage the drama of coming to unknow. The signature move of modernism is shock, just as resolution is the trademark of realism.Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner wrought their most compelling experimental effects by undermining an earlier Enlightenment project of knowing. Weinstein draws on major Enlightenment thinkers to identify constituent components of the narrative of coming to know—the progressive narrative underwriting two centuries of Western realist fiction. The book proceeds by framing modernist unknowing between prior practices of realist knowing, on the one hand, and, on the other, certain later practices—postmodern and postcolonial—that move beyond knowing altogether. In so doing, Weinstein proposes a metahistory of the Western novel, from Daniel Defoe to Toni Morrison. Philip Weinstein explores the modernist commitment to unknowing by addressing the work of three supreme experimental writers: Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner. In their novels, the narrative props that support the drama of coming to know are refused. When space turns uncanny rather than lawful, when time ceases to be linear and progressive, objects and others become unfamiliar. So does the subject seeking to know them. Weinstein argues that modernist texts work, by way of surprise and arrest, to subvert the familiarity and narrative progression intrinsic to realist fiction. Rather than staging the drama of coming to know, they stage the drama of coming to unknow. The signature move of modernism is shock, just as resolution is the trademark of realism. Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner wrought their most compelling experimental effects by undermining an earlier Enlightenment project of knowing. Weinstein draws on major Enlightenment thinkers to identify constituent components of the narrative of coming to know—the progressive narrative underwriting two centuries of Western realist fiction. The book proceeds by framing modernist unknowing between prior practices of realist knowing, on the one hand, and, on the other, certain later practices—postmodern and postcolonial—that move beyond knowing altogether. In so doing, Weinstein proposes a metahistory of the Western novel, from Daniel Defoe to Toni Morrison.
PDF
