Top Research Papers on Kafka

This article interprets the major novels by Kafka not as the expression of subjectivity, but as the presentation of the Other to which this subjectivity refers. This Other is not composed of a specified divinity or a particular social configuration. Rather, the absurd in Kafka refers to a universe

was introduced to Kafka by my father. I was a teenager. It was tax season and my father was holed up in his office, his desktop strewn with forms and receipts and mysterious shoe boxes filled with paper, the way, at exam time, it would be covered with ungraded bluebooks. My father was a professor of German literature. He was born in Vienna in 1924, the same year Kafka died in Prague; they missed each other by eight days, though Kafka's burial was delayed and he was actually put in the ground on June 1 1 , the day my father was born. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had vanished by the time of my fa...

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.

Each work of Kafka's is so rich in "interrelationships" that it is virtually impossible to engage in reasoning about them without analysis of notions "pertaining to content." Here an estheticist, even one who regards the immanent approach as obligatory, faces a dilemma that, as a general rule, confronts only someone just starting a career as critic: whether, upon having analyzed a work, to leave it to the reader himself to draw the conclusions in social philosophy, or whether to construct his analysis directly on the basis of historical, sociological, philosophical, esthetic, and psychological...

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...

Kafka experienced and interpreted diseases in such particular styles that he seemed to become more familiar with the state of being ill than that of being healthy.

The new Kafka, who comes at the end and who acts, shows us how the metamorphosis of jouissance from the letter to the body becomes possible by the paternal metaphor initiated in the encounter with Dora Diamant.

An ongoing trial in Tel Aviv is set to determine who will have stewardship of several boxes of Kafka’s original writings, including primary drafts of his published works, currently stored in Zurich and Tel Aviv. As is well known, Kafka left his published and unpublished work to Max Brod, along with the explicit instruction that the work should be destroyed on Kafka’s death. Indeed, Kafka had apparently already burned much of the work himself. Brod refused to honour the request, although he did not publish everything that was bequeathed to him. He published the novels The Trial, The Castle and ...

Kafka is an "eccentric genius" of the western literature in the 20th century because he belongs to the literature as a whole rather than to any literature school, and he belongs to the world as a whole rather than to any nation since surpasses any partiality and prejudice of any nation. It is just because of his uniqueness that almost every "ism" gets inspiration from him, every school traces its origination from him and lots of great contemporary writers regard him as a distinguished one whom they can refer to.

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.

Kafka’s work, although it never mentions Job by name, has repeatedly been read in terms of this biblical figure who challenges the claim of divine justice in the face of human suffering. In recent decades, critics have pointed out fairly convincing, concrete and detailed similarities between Kafka’s work and the Book of Job. Most notably, Northrop Frye, in The Great Code, regards the writings of Kafka “as a series of commentaries on the Book of Job” and terms Kafka’s most famous novel, The Trial, “a kind of Midrash” on this biblical book.1 Other critics consider this novel “a conscious paralle...

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...

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 ...

In Kafka's fiction there are many journeys but few arrivals. A typical example is the protagonist of "Ein Landarzt" riding naked through the blizzard, insisting, "Niemals komme ich so nach Hause" (E 205). 1 The abrupt switch to present tense at this point, which suggests that the preceding story is past but the return journey continues even to the present moment, strengthens the impression that the journey truly is unending. Yet this is the same ten mile distance that he had previously travelled in "only a moment" ("nur einen Augenblick"). He expresses no concern about direction, only about th...

“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 ...

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...

Results suggest that the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning patterns are enhanced by the presence of a meaning threat, and this prediction derives from the meaning-maintenance model.

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 ...

Kafka configures gender roles in both familiar and unexpected ways. His characters, despite certain conformities with the stereotypes of his age, are in flux, calling to mind Otto Weininger's scale of masculinity and femininity. Gender boundaries in Kafka's writings of all periods are indistinct as are boundaries between species. For Kafka one is not born male or female, to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, one becomes one or the other or sometimes a mixture of the two. As a recent critic has pointed out, his approach to gender was tied up closely with Jewish thinking on the subject. A close look...

This essay offers a reading of Kafka’s long-ignored short narrative piece “Die Prüfung” (1920), uncovering the paradoxes of testing that the curious ending of the text exposes. Confronting the parable first with Brod’s Heidentum, Christentum, Judentum and second with one of the most widely discussed of Kafka’s parables, namely “Vor dem Gesetz,” the essay explores Kafka’s reconfigurations of the intricate relationship between grace and sin, calling and serving, the law and the examination. The essay concludes by showing how the pedagogical and psychological discourse of “testing” circa 1920 was...