Top Research Papers on Kafka

This paper examines the first appearance, in the writing of Kafka, of the temporality of the written word which forever cancels out what has not been written and, at the same time, sparks a “not yet.” The Kafkaesque story touches us because of these points of convergence and of coincidence, points which cannot be formulated and stun us and which speak to our “milieu of being.” However, the initial appearance is also the taking of the body as occurred when Joseph K. was arrested in The Trial.

“Kafka after Kafka” (Dutch: “Kafka na Kafka”) tries, by unraveling the complex 'topography' Deleuze & Guattari make of Kafka's work, to answer the question how to position their book Kafka – Towards a minor literature amidst the large amount of literature written about Kafka and his works. This topography involves Kafka's search for an absolute deterritorialisation, the need of which he becomes aware of through writing his letters. Although Kafka's stories eventually get caught up in an oscillation between poles, they do provide a first attempt at such a deterritorialisation. Finally, in...

Abstract:In the winter of 1911–12 Franz Kafka developed a programmatic concept of community against the backdrop of a double frame, formed, on the one hand, by Martin Buber's Cultural Zionism and Itzhak Löwy's Jewish folk culture and, on the other, by the opposing outlooks of Max Brod and Karl Kraus on German-Jewish literature. Kafka responded to these encounters with two sets of texts, each constructing community by way of literature, as a community based on the circulation of writing in the 'Schema für kleinere Litteraturen' as well as a community resting on performance and speech in the 'Ei...

We investigated the effects of narrative perspective on mental imagery by comparing responses to an English translation of Franz Kafka’s Das Schloß (The Castle) in the published version (narrated in the third person) versus an earlier (first-person) draft. We analysed participants’ pencil drawings of their imaginative experience for presence/absence of specific features (K. and the castle) and for image entropy (a proxy for image unpredictability). We also used word embeddings to perform cluster analysis of participants’ verbal free-response testimony, generating thematic clusters independent...

An analysis of different ways to implement encryption in Kafka is presented and the first c omplete s ystem f or implementing encryption-at-rest at the granularity of a Kafka topic at scale is described.

This survey paper systematically surveys the research literature in this field by carefully classifying it into key macro areas, namely algorithms, networks, data, cyber-physical systems, and security, and aims to identify and analyze the optimization aspects relevant to each area.

In Kafka, The Other takes on an alien and otherworldly form. Gregor Samsa, Kafka’s protagonist in the ‘Metamorphosis’, leads an uneventful life until his transformation into a grotesque monster incites the worst in his family. According to Bakhtin, the grotesque in literature and art was used as a form of satire to question the hypocrisy and hegemony of the dominant class. In ‘Metamorphosis’,Gregor morphs into an interstitiality that his family finds extremely threatening. He is no more their own, he is The Other and his grotesqueness is proof of this fact. In this paper, we study the relation...

This work model the problem of determining the required number of consumers, and the partition-consumer assignments, as a variable item size bin packing variant, and proposes the R-score metric to account for these rebalancing costs.

Metamorphosis is one of Kafka's representative short stories. It mainly reveals the alienation of modern western society through the absurd story of the protagonist Gregor Samsa turning into a beetle. From the perspectives of self-alienation, the alienation of living environment, the alienation of interpersonal relationship and the alienation of the relationship between man and nature, this paper discusses the squeeze and distortion of human beings in the western capitalist society, and reproduces the true picture of the abnormal society.

This paper model the Apache Kafka topic partitioning process for a given topic, and proposes two simple, yet efficient heuristics to solve the problem, and demonstrates that they respect the hard constraints on replication latency and perform better w.r.t. unavailability time and OS load.

The whole proves Kafka's introversion, ambivalence, hypersensitivity, obstinancy, anxieties, behavioral anomalies, a life rich in fantasies and his underestimation of his own literary work.

Kafka's trials and animal metamorphoses are very common motifs in Jewish folklore; he also rewrote ancient myths and legends and frequently used a mock-midrashic, rabbinic discourse. Of course, many folk elements discussed in this chapter are not restricted to Jewish folklore but share characteristics with other folk traditions. What is of interest is the way Kafka recreates folk motifs and legends within a modern Jewish cultural framework and thus gives them new meaning. Folk elements, whether Jewish or non- Jewish, never exist for their own sake but rather merge with the author's own imagina...

The report of the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme was published in July 2023. It found that the scheme was a ‘costly failure of public administration, in both human and economic terms’. The Trial by Franz Kafka is a seminal literary metaphor for how bureaucracy can give way to corruption and dystopia. In a brief parallel reading, I show how the findings made by Commissioner Holmes conform with Kafka's blueprint of an absurd bureaucratic machine. I also explore some broader implications of this argument.

Kafka’s works abounds in animal figures that occupy an ontological liminality. They are nether truly animals nor exactly humans but always pushes towards a zone where the categories become immaterial. In addition to causing literary disorientation, these figures serve to offer stringent critique of our anthropocentric idealism that sustains our species identity. By carefully examining the dialectical interplay between knowledge and ignorance, the articles attempt to situate Kafka’s non-human figures as expressing a deeper connection between concepts of animality and idea of literature. Keyword...

If, in the unlikely event, you do not know what defines a toxic workplace, just ask sociology professor and anarchist scholar John Asimakopoulos. He has acquired considerable expertise on the subject since he began teaching at Bronx Community College, a constituent college of the City University of New York, in spring 2004. The circumstances of his firing and reinstatement illustrate the injustice and lack of transparency at BCC.

A recurring aspect of Kafka’s “anti-heroes” is hesitation, remaining stuck on the threshold, waiting in vain to be able to gain access. This is highlighted in an exemplary way by the parable that contains the meaning of the Trial, Before the Law: the countryman waits his whole life to be able to cross the door guarded by the guardian. The other parable of Hasidic inspiration, A Message from the Emperor, also presents a similar situation, albeit inverted: the message sent by the dying emperor cannot reach the “individual”, who nevertheless awaits it confidently, the continuity of the path does ...

SUMMARY:This essay is a contribution to the discussion forum "Mainstream Narratives of Soviet History and the Laughter of Surprise," framed as responses by literary scholars, historians, and political scientists to Sheila Fitzpatrick's essay "Soviet History as Black Comedy." Using the text that appears on a new memorial plaque on the building in Prague where Franz Kafka was born, Galina Babak discusses attempts to "catch" Franz Kafka in rigid identity categories and she notes the new plaque's "neopositivist" rejection of this approach. This same collision encapsulates the challenge of writing ...

Abstract This essay examines the metamorphic nature of Franz Kafka’s writing. I focus in particular on the unpublished manuscripts Kafka left behind, which reveal the structural instability of his texts and the stories they tell. These stories were malleable and adaptive, meaning they changed depending on the writing environment and the materials Kafka used to compose his texts. Max Brod’s influential edition of Kafka’s manuscripts, however, literally erased Kafka’s metamorphic writing style and replaced it with a canonical body of work authorized by “Kafka.” This “Kafka,” I demonstrate in thi...

In this new volume of Kafka studies, which is addressed to both beginning readers of Kafka as well as Kafka scholars, Stanley Corngold discusses Kafka's work in a variety of novel perspectives, including Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther; Nietzsche’s conception of aphoristic form; bureaucratic organization; accident and risk; the logic of possession and inheritance; and myth, among others. Even as Corngold explores Kafka’s work across different fields and tangents, he does so in vivid, readable prose, free of jargon, and with an eye to Kafka’s ongoing relevance to the concerns of his d...

Abstract Franz Kafka, intrigued by the possibility of representing movement in a still medium, made several drawings of galloping horses. This essay examines these drawings in the context of contemporaneous attempts to capture dynamic motion in visual media. Around 1900, artists and scientists experimented with various painting styles and photographic techniques to depict the movement of human and animal bodies in highbrow art, popular entertainment, and to advance the science of sport. Kafka’s short literary work “Wunsch, Indianer zu werden” represents a related attempt to depict the movement...

“A Report to an Academy” is a short story by Franz Kafka that presents a first-hand narration of an ape’s humanization through learning to speak and behave as an average early 20th century European. Red Peter, who receives his name after a bald red scar he got on his cheek during a hunting expedition, tells the academy how he learned to leave his apehood behind for a way out of captivity. He then confronts the reader with overt examples of ways in which notions of identity appear and are altered in education and growth. Critical of the colonial context that gives Red Peter his new identity of ...

This paper will directly use The Disappeared as the main text to be studied, and other works of Kafka such as The Castle as supplementary and background information. Mainly through the perspective of “writing about the city”, it will focus on the description of urban life in The Disappeared, sort out the modern state of human life, and try to summarize Kafka’s insights and answers to the dilemma of transcending modernity. This will provide a new perspective and possibility for the study of Kafka’s works, and fill a part of the academic gap.

O presente ensaio procura se aproximar da zooliteratura de Franz Kafka para caracterizarmos o que chamamos de subjetividades desérticas. Com a noção de subjetividades desérticas procuramos enfatizar a construção da subjetividade como algo permanentemente instável como uma miragem no deserto. Esta instabilidade ontológica tão móvel quanto andar com os pés na areia se caracteriza pela forma-plástica e a forma-morte. Nesse sentido, Kafka nos ajuda a adentrar nessa instabilidade com seus personagens, seja um homem que um dia acorda um inseto, ou ainda, um macaco que se transforma em um homem.

In “Kafka's Reception in Bulgaria until 1989” Mladen Vlashki combines the modern theory of cultural transfer with the sociological theories of the field and with the system theory. The monograph presents the most essential characteristic of the writer's work, against the background of which the hypothesis of future difficulties in front of Kafka's reception in view of the literary field in Bulgaria acquires density. A solid reconstruction of the trajectories of Kafka's reception in France, England and the United States has been made, which imposes it as a classic of modernity. Compared to the re...

Roth travels to Prague and encounters the dissident writers of Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe. He begins his “Writers from the Other Europe” series (1974–89) and creates new contacts with authors like Ivan Klíma, Milan Kundera, and Danilo Kiš. He provides for these disenfranchised writers by establishing a bank account with support from Updike, Styron, and Cheever. Soon the impact of Eastern Europe appears in early drafts of American Pastoral started in 1972, immediately after his first trip to Prague. The impact of of his exposure to Eastern European writers appears in works like “Looking ...

Franz Kafka’s manuscripts are among the greatest treasures of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The vast majority of hisNachlass is housed in the Bodleian’s special collections, and its presence has resulted in world-leading research and critical editions, in conferences and public exhibitions, outreach work and international collaborations. In this article I trace the journey of Kafka’s manuscripts, before reflecting on their legacy — on the opportunities and challenges of this collection and its role in a forward-looking and inclusive vision of Kafka studies in the twenty-first century. So how did ...

This chapter refers to the Brooklyn Bridge (BB) Park as the second site where the author sought to land the floating pool but was under the auspices of a subsidiary of a state-run entity, the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC). It discusses the author and her team's participation at the BB Park Corporation meeting, including Malcolm McLaren, a waterfront engineer. It also recounts how McLaren could explain technical terms regarding barge placement and anchoring to the author and her team in plain English. The chapter details the intention of the BB Park Corporation meeting to talk abo...

This chapter explores Crumb’s work on the book Introducing Kafka, for which he provided the illustrations. The chapter begins with the ways Crumb has incorporated themes from Jewish culture into not only his Kafka drawings, but in his work as a whole. Crumb often depicts himself as a schlemiel—Yiddish for a vulnerable loser. Like Kafka, Crumb had a troubled relationship to his own father. This is one reason why Crumb felt such an affinity for Kafka’s writings. Crumb also concentrates in several drawings on Kafka’s intense relationship to writing, a theme which he also depicts in his Bukowski d...

Cet article part de la nouvelle de Kafka « Ein altes Blatt » dont il propose une lecture approfondie pour en dégager des interprétations variées (historique, biographique, appliquée au contexte de la Bohême ou de l’Empire tout entier, sioniste, anti-sémite…) à travers sa mise en rapport avec le contexte culturel et discursif contemporain. Il se prononce finalement en faveur d’une interprétation interculturelle qui se démarque de façon critique de la littéralité pratiquée par les interprétations évoquées plus haut. Ce faisant, il ne fait que suivre l’exemple du sujet auctorial de la nouvelle qu...

This chapter, the first of three case studies designed to carry the story of representations of connectivity forward from the moment in the history of literature in English at which Chapter 5 left off, develops its own version of island theory in order to revalue the two novels Strindberg wrote about islands in the Stockholm archipelago, The People of Hemsö (1887) and By the Open Sea (1890). Islands insulate and isolate. They insulate the connectivity which sustains both empire and international trade from social and political circumstance; and, in doing so, isolate their inhabitants. The popu...

The Metamorphosis is a novella written by Franz Kafka. This novel tells about a young man named Gregor Samsa who has experienced alienation. This research aims to understand the effects of alienation experienced by Gregor Samsa as a major character in The Metamorphosis. Erich Fromm's theory about three mechanisms of escape is used to analyse the effort of Gregor Samsa in solving his psychological problem of alienation. Modern man usually uses three mechanisms of escape by Erich Fromm to reduce the feeling of fear and isolation of burdened freedom when they want to be free. This research uses q...

To revolt, in a political sense, means to rebel against control. According to Karl Marx, the structure of capitalism causes the individual worker to play a minor role in the entire capitalist system.[i] Consequently, the worker feels no true worth or attachment to his work, or the “alien” products of it.[ii] In Kafka’s fable, The Metamorphosis, when Gregor Samsa wakes to discover that he has transformed into a “monstrous insect”, he finds himself “helplessly” struggling to manoeuvre his new form. [iii] It first appears as if his body is behaving contrary to his expectations and is revolting ag...

"You have to keep your ears open for Alan Bennett's Insurance Man. It had visual impact so powerful that you were in danger of missing some very good lines simply because nobody spoke them in close up; you had to catch them on the wing. And if there was one line that summed up both Bennett's play and Kafka's novel The Trial, which provided some of this framework, that line was "Just because you're the injured party, it doesn't mean you're not guilty"." (Guardian). Kafka himself figures in these two brilliant scripts: one a hilarious comedy, the other a profound and searching drama. This editio...

Reading Kafka's literature today, in Jerusalem/Al-Quds, presents us with a challenge. Reading Kafka ‘here and now’, following his ‘messages’, concealed in his prose, notes and letters, demands us to engage anew with our traditions. It calls us to reconsider the legacies of Kafka's own literature, revising European modernism, while studying Talmudic and Kabbalistic texts, learning Chassidic tales and reading Arabic and Persian stories. A ‘Kafkan’ reading thus demands a permanent interruption in our fields of study, reflecting the very idea of Studium (studying, Talmud). Kafka's Messenger, who c...

Den Vortrag, der in dem ‘Gulliver Airship’ vom DOX gehalten wurde, haben sich die Mitglieder der ‘Paragone’ (Freundeskreis der Skulpturensammlung Dresden) anlässlich unseres gemeinsamen Aufenthaltes in Prag im Oktober 2019 erbeten. Von dem Begriff ‘Häusliches’ ausgehend behandelt der Vortrag in gebotener Kürze Traumata und deren dichterische Umsetzung im Werke Franz Kafkas.

Апстракт: Тема рада је један посебан аспект Кафкиног дела или Кафкино дело из једног новог угла посматрања, сагледано на примеру приповетке „У кажњеничкој колонији“. Циљ овог истраживања је да на примеру Кафкине приповетке „У кажњеничкој колонији“ покаже на који начин су иследнички поступци литераризовани у књижевном делу писца Франца Кафке. Метод рада је херменеутичко-феноменолошки. Књижевно дело се, како показује ово истраживање, одликује пре свега једним, гадамеровски речено, „значењским прирастом“ у односу на ванлитерарни, иследничко-истражни, поступак. Херменеутичко истраживање приповетке...

The plot of Sonata in K, Karen An-Hwei Lee’s lyrical homage to Franz Kafka, comes straight out of Hollywood science fiction: The author of The Metamorphosis (1915) and The Trial (1925) has been reanimated, cloned “from a finger-bone illegally excavated from a grave in Prague” or possibly replicated as “a hologram designed from one of [his] photographs.” Summoned to twenty first century Los Angeles by an enigmatic directorproducer duo to work on a film, Kafka relies on K, his Japanese-American interpreter and the novel’s narrator, to help him make sense of the intervening years since his untime...

Issue theme - Process:Music. At the beginning there was an encounter, accidental or not. In Zagreb, in the early 1960's, Orson Welles was shooting parts of The Trial based on the writing of Franz Kafka. A kind of rumor, a tale, was burned into the memory of a city that at the time feverishly invested itself into modernism. Among those newly founded institutions the Zagreb Music Biennale has played a significant role. Almost four decades later, in April 2009 the Process:Music program within the 25th Music Biennale, has sought to take a step back, to (dis)orient itself in regard to the meeti...

Anmeldelse af Franz Kafka: Narration, Rhetoric and Reading . Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2011, 251 sider.

With inefficient bureaucratic institutions, the effects of laws are hard to assess and incompetent politicians may pass laws to build a reputation as skillful reformers. Since too many laws curtail bureaucratic efficiency, this mechanism can generate a steady state with Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Temporary surges in political instability heighten the incentives to overproduce laws and can shift the economy towards the Kafkaesque state. Consistent with the theory, after a surge in political instability in the early 1990s, Italy experienced a significant increase in the amount of poor-quality legis...

ABSTRACT:This articles examines two of Franz Kafka's lesser-known fragments in light of the Prague Golem legend and its popularity in the early twentieth century: a brief story about a rabbi's attempt to make a clay man in his house and the tale of a mysterious animal that lives in a provincial synagogue. By tracing threads of narrative continuity between these fragments, which are the only explicitly Jewish tales in Kafka's corpus, and with earlier versions of the Golem tradition that were available to Kafka, the article illuminates his deep engagement with Jewish storytelling traditions. At ...

Abstract From the very beginning, Habsburgian literature was closely tied to the Empire’s »bureaucracy« – both to the administrative apparatus and to the class of officials who claimed this title as their own. The fact that numerous authors were recruited from this class may well have helped to create the »Habsburg myth«: the literary romanticisation of bureaucrats as loyal to the Emperor and as cultural pillars of a variegated empire that never accomplished to be a state in the modern sense. However, a real tie-up between the citizens and the bureaucracy, for which proof can be found still to...

This chapter contends that J. M. Coetzee’s writing strives to achieve the detached and otherworldly modernism of Franz Kafka but fails to do so because political and ethical beliefs displace what the chapter calls the “Kafka effect,” a form of writing that stands apart from the world and refuses to judge it. The chapter examines three aspects of Coetzee’s work: his spare and minimalist style, his handling of authorial figures, and his turn toward the “reverse Bildungsroman.” Despite Coetzee’s “will to neutrality,” novels like Life and Times of Michael K (1983), The Master of Petersburg (1995),...

1. Preamble: First Grief Two years before his death, Kafka sent the very short story "First Grief"?"Erstes Leid"?to the editor of a German periodical, Genius. It related a trapeze-artist's striving for perfection in performance of an aerial act and distancing himself from humanity by the needs of this act. The accompanying letter which was discovered in 1983 assessed the story in self-deprecating tones. Kafka called it "wretched stuff"?"j?mmerliches Zeug"?and implored the editor to destroy it if it should not meet with his full approval.1 In the same year he wrote to his closest friend Max Bro...

Robert Archambeau, The Kafka Sutra. Asheville: MadHat Press, 2015. 108 pp. $18.95Robert Archambeau's new book of poems The Kafka Sutra differs from his previous book Home and Variations (2004) in the degree to which it explores the possibilities of appropriation as a literary device. Appropriation, moreover, becomes a hermeneutic tool in Archambeau's hands. A poet and a critic-the author of Laureates and Heretics (2010), The Poet Resigns (2013), and the forthcoming Making Nothing Happen-he employs it to compose his poems and to perform criticism on his textual sources. Entertaining and intelli...

The process algebra CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) and the model checking tool PAT (Process Analysis Toolkit) are applied and the results show that the Kerberos protocol has improved the security of Kafka messaging mechanism in some aspects, but there are still some security loopholes.

Probably the most entertaining English cookery book of 2005, which to my chagrin I did not discover until 2006 (via Barbara Santich), was Kafka’s Soup. A complete history of world literature in 14 recipes by the London artist and photographer Mark Crick (Libri Publications, £9.99). Each recipe is written in the voice of a giant of global culture (Jane Austen, Raymond Chandler, Borges, Chaucer, Homer, Woolf, de Sade, etc.); the illustrations, too, are amusing and intelligent parodies. An American edition is out this winter (Harcourt) and a French translation is in the pipeline. Mark Crick has k...

The title of this essay provokes the objection that its author must either be guilty of a mere pretence to ignorance, or should not write about what he does not understand. Yet while there is much in Kafka that I do not understand, I believe that I do understand some things in Kafka by understanding my not understanding Kafka. At least the situation is somewhat kafkaesque. On the eve of a visit to his beloved fiancee which led to the first-inconclusive-breakup of the engagement, Kafka wrote: "I write differently from the way I speak, speak differently from the way I think, think differently fr...

Kafka had a great interest in China.He was obsessed by Hanye,written by Yuan Mei,a poet of the Qing dynasty.Kafka studied many Chinese classical works,especially those of Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi.He also wrote some of his important short stories such as Chinese Great Wall,An Imperial Message based on his knowledge of China.Owing to his reception of the Chinese culture,Kafka has a deep influence on writers in China's New Period,such as Zong Pu,Can Xue and Yu Hua.

potential use to an editor than general value-judgments; and inevitably I have recorded cavils far more than agreements. There are any number of helpful references and perceptive readings in this edition that I shall have to lump together in making a final statement of admiration. Rudrum has done an excellent piece of work, and one that should be welcomed by readers of whatever kind who are looking for a good edition of Vaughan.