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Author: James Rolleston Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 0271072830 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 185
Book Description
Can one speak of Kafka's heroes as "characters"? If so, why is it so hard to define their characteristics? If not, how is the reader persuaded to accompany them on their existential journeys, accepting their behavior as falling within the realm of human logic? This study argues that Kafka's fiction has two conflicting premises: the subjective impossibility of human existence, foreclosing all hope of "meaning" in individual actions; and the ordered structure of human thoughts which assign meaning to the smallest event and analyze endlessly the behavior of other people. Kafka's characters are always, either potentially or actually, moving in both directions at once, earnestly building up a continuous logic to their actions while skeptically dismantling their own pretensions to existence. The device of the circumscribed narrator, congruent with the hero, knowing only what the hero knows, yet not identical with him, enables Kafka to contain both fundamental tendencies in a single sentence. Although Kafka is widely read, his works seem to give rise very easily to misconceptions; this study is designed primarily to facilitate an intelligent reading of Kafka. Without imposing answers of its own, it seeks to foster an awareness of the problems of perspective and presentation which Kafka engages.
Author: James Rolleston Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 0271072830 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 185
Book Description
Can one speak of Kafka's heroes as "characters"? If so, why is it so hard to define their characteristics? If not, how is the reader persuaded to accompany them on their existential journeys, accepting their behavior as falling within the realm of human logic? This study argues that Kafka's fiction has two conflicting premises: the subjective impossibility of human existence, foreclosing all hope of "meaning" in individual actions; and the ordered structure of human thoughts which assign meaning to the smallest event and analyze endlessly the behavior of other people. Kafka's characters are always, either potentially or actually, moving in both directions at once, earnestly building up a continuous logic to their actions while skeptically dismantling their own pretensions to existence. The device of the circumscribed narrator, congruent with the hero, knowing only what the hero knows, yet not identical with him, enables Kafka to contain both fundamental tendencies in a single sentence. Although Kafka is widely read, his works seem to give rise very easily to misconceptions; this study is designed primarily to facilitate an intelligent reading of Kafka. Without imposing answers of its own, it seeks to foster an awareness of the problems of perspective and presentation which Kafka engages.
Author: Paul M. Malone Publisher: Frankfurt am Main : P. Lang ISBN: Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
"The low critical opinion of dramatic adaptations of prose works makes clear that the dramatic text is widely seen as unable to compete with the narrative text that it adapts. Privileging the text of a play as the site of meaning is inadequate, however, given the social nature of theatre; rather, the socio-historical context of a production must be investigated to flesh out the meaning of the text in dramatic production. In this study, four theatrical adaptations of Franz Kafka's novel The Trial (1925) from different decades and countries, and in three different languages, illustrate a history not only of Kafka reception, but also of society, politics and theatrical practice in western Europe and Canada. The diversity of these visions of Kafka's work pleads for the acceptance of dramatic adaptation as a creative form of interpretation, rather than as an ill-advised misappropriation, of its source."
Author: James Rolleston Publisher: Boydell & Brewer ISBN: 9781571133366 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 396
Book Description
Kafka's novels and stories fascinate readers and critics of each generation. Although all theories attempt to appropriate Kafka, there is no one key to his work. This work aims to present a point of view while taking account of previous Kafka research.
Author: Richard T. Gray Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 0313061424 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 392
Book Description
Known for depicting alienation, frustration, and the victimization of the individual by impenetrable bureaucracies, Kafka's works have given rise to the term Kafkaesque. This encyclopedia details Kafka's life and writings. Included are more than 800 alphabetically arranged entries on his works, characters, family members and acquaintances, themes, and other topics. Most of the entries cite works for further reading, and the Encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography.
Author: Clayton Koelb Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501745964 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 283
Book Description
In the first book to study Franz Kafka from the perspective of modern rhetorical theory, Clayton Koelb explores such questions as how Kafka understood the reading process, how he thematized the problematic of reading, and how his highly distinctive style relates to what Koelb describes as the "passion of reading."
Author: Marc Lucht Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 0739143964 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
Kafka's Creatures: Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings is an interdisciplinary collection of essays on Franz Kafka's use of non-human creatures in his writings. It is written from a variety of interpretive perspectives and highlights diverse ways of understanding how Kafka's use of these creatures illuminate his work in general.
Author: Naama Harel Publisher: University of Michigan Press ISBN: 0472902091 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 217
Book Description
Nonhuman figures are ubiquitous in the work of Franz Kafka, from his early stories down to his very last one. Despite their prominence throughout his oeuvre, Kafka’s animal representations have been considered first and foremost as mere allegories of intrahuman matters. In recent years, the allegorization of Kafka’s animals has been poetically dismissed by Kafka’s commentators and politically rejected by posthumanist scholars. Such critique, however, has yet to inspire either an overarching or an interdiscursive account. This book aims to fill this lacuna. Positing animal stories as a distinct and significant corpus within Kafka’s entire poetics, and closely examining them in dialogue with both literary and posthumanist analysis, Kafka’s Zoopoetics critically revisits animality, interspecies relations, and the very human-animal contradistinction in the writings of Franz Kafka. Kafka’s animals typically stand at the threshold between humanity and animality, fusing together human and nonhuman features. Among his liminal creatures we find a human transformed into vermin (in “The Metamorphosis”), an ape turned into a human being (in “A Report to an Academy”), talking jackals (in “Jackals and Arabs”), a philosophical dog (in “Researches of a Dog”), a contemplative mole-like creature (in “The Burrow”), and indiscernible beings (in “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People”). Depicting species boundaries as mutable and obscure, Kafka creates a fluid human-animal space, which can be described as “humanimal.” The constitution of a humanimal space radically undermines the stark barrier between human and other animals, dictated by the anthropocentric paradigm. Through denying animalistic elements in humans, and disavowing the agency of nonhuman animals, excluding them from social life, and neutralizing compassion for them, this barrier has been designed to regularize both humanity and animality. The contextualization of Kafka's animals within posthumanist theory engenders a post-anthropocentric arena, which is simultaneously both imagined and very real.
Author: James Rolleston
Author: James Rolleston
Author: Evelyn Torton Beck
Author: Paul M. Malone
Author: Steven Berkoff
Author: James Rolleston
Author: Evelyn Torton Beck
Author: Richard T. Gray
Author: Clayton Koelb
Author: Marc Lucht
Author: Naama Harel