Franz Kafka

Kafka's Verwandlung, Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the Limits of Metaphor

by Rebecca Schuman

The Experience of Unease in Metropolitan Space Through Franz Kafka’s The Trial

by Aparna Parikh

This paper looks at Franz Kafka's The Trial in order to extract modes of unease that can be experienced in the various... more This paper looks at Franz Kafka's The Trial in order to extract modes of unease that can be experienced in the various function of everyday existence.

Montaña, Edificación & libro

by Montserrat Albores Gleason

2009

Mauntain, Building & Book

by Montserrat Albores Gleason

2009

Sharing Secrets, or On Burrowing in Public

by Ian Angus

“Sharing Secrets, or On Burrowing in Public” in Ian Angus (ed.), Anarcho-Modernism: Toward a New Critical Theory. In Honour of Jerry Zaslove. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2001.

The Kafkaesque Cinematic Language of the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man

by Ido Lewit

Published in the Journal of the Kafka Society of America on Oct 2011 (Thirty third & Thirty fourth issue)

In my article I reflect on the affinity of the Coen Brothers' film A Serious Man (2009) to Kafka-affiliated rhetorical... more In my article I reflect on the affinity of the Coen Brothers' film A Serious Man (2009) to Kafka-affiliated rhetorical structures. I refer to the film's utilization of the biblical stories of Job and of Cain & Abel as mythological grounds for the impotency of the human rationality regarding matters of faith and the existence and actions of God. Formally, I propose, the Coen Brothers convey this notion of futility of the human mind by means which can be regarded as cinematic transformations of common rhetorical practices in Kafka's writing, which I refer to as: "Incessant Negation", "Regression ad Infinitum" and "Cognitive Nihilism".

Kafka's "Vor dem Gesetz" - de ultieme hermeneutische uitdaging. - In: Encore. Tijdschrift voor psychoanalyse en cultuur 1 (2000) 2, 7-17.

by Walter Schönau

Notes from underground car-parks: cynicism and the non-places of research

by JD Taylor

Presented at the Unfinished Business: Undoing Cultural Studies conference on 5th June 2011, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Marc Augé's description of the 'non-place' continues to enjoy academic popularity as a description of how paradigmatic... more Marc Augé's description of the 'non-place' continues to enjoy academic popularity as a description of how paradigmatic spaces of neoliberal capitalism – malls, airports, hotels, car-parks and other public sites – deprive users of agency or identity. The term 'negative capitalism' is developed here to explore this problem of negativity increasingly preoccupying cultural studies, of how time, space and agency are negated by the speeds and digitisation of new hand-held technologies, of the continuous labour-precarity of 'non-stop inertia' (Southwell 2011), or a fatalistic denial of even the radical or redemptive possibilities of the future (Fisher 2009). With citizens privatised into customers, and politicians increasingly becoming business agents for hire, a certain cynicism and negativity has become embedded into leading cultural studies research, leading to an almost Fideistic return to a Hegelian Leninism in Zizek, Hallward, Badiou and others.

This paper identifies this trend of negativity within neoliberal capitalism and contemporary responses to it within academic discourse, and considers its effects and significance in a contemporary climate of malaise and resistance. Though the modern non-place reduces workers to a 'solitary contractuality' (Augé 1997), Ballard's recent Kingdom Come (2007) offers a perspective in how non-places satisfy embedded desires for security and social cohesion. Questioning these loaded terms brings contemporary critical theorists into confrontation with popular cultures, where using shopfront churches, urban music and recent TV programmes like Misfits and Benidorm, various possibilities of reclaiming the 'non-place' are considered. Is this negativity instead a symptom of academic isolation from surrounding communities and cultures, an effect itself of increasing demands of academic labour? Or can accounts of the 'non-place' be located in a wider cultural cynicism that passively accedes to the 'rules' of negative capitalism rather than its 'facts' (Virno 2004), criticising socio-economic and cultural phenomena without engaging in any attempt to establish an alternative space or positivity? Finally, a strategy of resisting neoliberal negative capitalism is outlined through a defence of the public, aiming fundamentally to stimulate conversations over how interdisciplinary research can overcome its despair and face the Gorgon, without turning to stone.

Una struttura del destino in Buzzati

by Giulio Savelli

La struttura studiata è «il racconto dell'attesa di un evento predeterminato a cui si manca». Una tale narrazione fa... more La struttura studiata è «il racconto dell'attesa di un evento predeterminato a cui si manca». Una tale narrazione fa riferimento - come una dissonanza fa riferimento all'accordo armonico - al destino, che a sua volta si può definire «il riconoscimento della peculiarità della relazione che lega [...] una serie di eventi, tale da dare la percezione di una necessità nel caso». Poichè il legame di senso fra eventi si forma naturalmente in una narrazione, le storie, nella loro generalità, rappresentano «la natura concreta e tangibile del destino» - quando nell'esperienza questo appare invece in modo episodico e sfuggente. Nel Deserto dei Tartari (come anche in due racconti, Cinque fratelli e Il Colombre) caso e necessità, costitutivi del destino, vengono invece disgiunti, e il destino risulta raddoppiato in uno reale e uno mancato. In simili storie di destino sviato ciò che il lettore riceve non è pertanto la riparazione al disordine e all'incoerenza dei fatti della vita - cioè quanto una storia offre solitamente - bensì «la formulazione generale per l'invincibile incoerenza» della vita stessa.

Algumas considerações sobre a Metamorfose de Kafka com base no texto “Anotações sobre Kafka” de Adorno

by Daniela Spinelli

“The Everyday’s Fabulous Beyond: Nonsense, Parable, and the Ethics of the Literary in Kafka and Wittgenstein”

by Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé

Comparative Literature 64:4 (Fall 2012)

Delusions of Agency

by Chris Fleming

Published in the book "Freedom and Confinement in Modernity" (New York: Palgrave, 2011).

תפילה וניכור פירוש למעשה ממלך עניו במסר קיסרי

by Dror Bar-yosef

blog post

פירוש, למעשה ממלך עניו של רבי נחמן מברסלב ומסר קיסרי של פרנץ קפקא, המתמקד ביחסי בין האדם לאלהיו והאדם לזולתו פירוש, למעשה ממלך עניו של רבי נחמן מברסלב ומסר קיסרי של פרנץ קפקא, המתמקד ביחסי בין האדם לאלהיו והאדם לזולתו

The castle of illusion: myth and reality in Kafka's Das Schloss

by stanley f. levine

“The Strange Case of the Disappearing Woman: Biblical Resonances in Kafka’s Fräulein Bürstner,” in From the Margins: Women of the Hebrew Bible and Their Afterlives (Peter Hawkins and Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg, eds.; Sheffield, U.K.: Phoenix, 2009), pp. 159–73.

by Martien Halvorson-Taylor

Od navoněných knírů k ornamentům řeči: vizualita psaní „V chrámu“ Kafkova Procesu (From the perfumed moustache to ornaments of speech: the visuality of writing “In the Cathedral” from Franz Kafka’s Trial)

by Tomáš Jirsa

In: Česká literatura v intermediální perspektivě. Akropolis, Praha 2011, s. 273-282.

My paper deals with a chapter from Franz Kafka’s novel through a visual mode which shapes the writing of the text.... more My paper deals with a chapter from Franz Kafka’s novel through a visual mode which shapes the writing of the text. This mode is represented by the architecture of the gothic cathedral, the principles of which were formulated by art historian Wilhelm Worringer in relation to his notion of “the gothic will to form”, and which are embodied in the figure of ornament. The space of the cathedral (intepreted as an “invention of writing”, not as a real construction), created by gothic lines resigning from representation, inspires an approach to literary speech not from the point of view of its message, but from the perspective of its motion and physiognomy. This staged encounter of literary speech and gothic space allows for experimentation and the possibility to avoid a classical interpretation focusing on the historical context or the author’s work, and to concentrate on the anonymous “movement of writing”, which runs through the text, on the understanding of its visuality and its resonance with space.

Kafka's Castle: Revisited

by Kile Jones

“Kafka’s Castle: Revisited,” Voices of Claremont Graduate University: Student Research Journal Vol. I, August 2011: 439-444

Kafka's Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle.

by Todd Herzog

“Brecht, Kafka, Benjamin: The mimetics of gesture, the intervention of history”, in Walter Benjamin: Images and Myths of Modernity, ed. Angeliki Spiropoulou, Athens: Alexandreia Publ., 2007, pp. 11-28.

by Angeliki Spiropoulou

The Autobiographical Discourse: Bruno Schulz's Private Mythology

by Svitlana Matviyenko

“The Autobiographical Discourse: Bruno Schulz's Private Mythology.” Proceedings of the International Conference “W uіamkach zwierciadіa... Bruno Schulz w 110 rocznicк urodzin i 60 rocznicк smierci.” Lublin Catholic University, Poland, December2002, Lublin, Poland. Edited by Malgorzata Kitowska-Lysiak and Wladyslaw Panas, Lublin: TN KUL, 2003 (IN POLISH)

The paper deals with some aspects of the autobiographical prose of Polish writer Bruno Schulz (1892-1942). Schulz's... more The paper deals with some aspects of the autobiographical prose of Polish writer Bruno Schulz (1892-1942). Schulz's style is compared to the prose of Franz Kafka, whose work Schulz admired and translated in Polish. The paper specifically focuses on the theme of masochism in literature as interpreted by Gilles Deleuze in Présentation de Sacher-Masoch.