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...

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...

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...

This paper provides a critical examination of the intellectual property sections of the Korea-Australia Free Trade Agreement 2014. Chapter 13 of the Korea-Australia Free Trade Agreement 2014 deals with the subject of intellectual property law. The Chapter covers such topics as the purposes and objectives of intellectual property law; copyright law; trade mark law; patent law; and intellectual property enforcement. The Joint Standing Committee on Treaties in the Australian Parliament highlighted the controversy surrounding this chapter of the agreement:The intellectual property rights chapter o...

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...

"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...

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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...

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.

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.

I wrote this story “The Judgment” in a single push during the night of the 22nd23rd, from ten o’clock until six o’clock in the morning. My legs had grown so stiff from sitting that I could just barely pull them out from under the desk. The terrible strain and joy as the story developed in front of me, as if I were advancing through a body of water. Several times during this night I carried my own weight on my back. How everything can be risked, how a great 1⁄2re is ready for everything, for the strangest inspirations, and they disappear in this 1⁄2re and rise up again . . . . It is only in thi...

There are three kinds of meanings in Kafka's novel The Trial: if nobody accused Joseph K., he must have been accused by himself, as Kafka often been accused by himself; Kafka described the sinister projects in the judicial departments and exposed the law problems; Kafka expressed his religious thoughts and feelings. The world in the novel is in and out of the law. It is the world of Kafka.

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...

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 ...

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...

Clarissa’s meditation on the young man who had killed himself (Donovan 96). Finally, Vespers merges with Compline, a “bedtime prayer” signaled by the “old woman going to txd” (MD 283). Sacrifice is the focal point at which all phases of the liturgy and the novel converge. The pattern shaped between the sacrifice of Christ and the immolation of Alcestis further implies for both Septimus and Clarissa that there might be a resurrection for one and a redemption for the other. Thus, the solution to the mystery that this secular scripture traces may be unveiled within the system where the pattern li...

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 ...

Kafka recognized many of his own perverse ideas in Gulliver's Travels, which he first read in 1921 (three years before his death), before writing his late animal tales. (1) He identified with Gulliver and found in Swift not an influence but a literary soul mate who seemed to see the world as he did. In Swift's Gulliver's Travels man discovers his animal nature; in Kafka's stories the animals--gigantic beetle in "The Metamorphosis," ape in "A Report to an Academy," dog in "Investigations of a Dog," mole in "The Burrow," and mouse in "Josephine the Singer"--think, speak, and act like men, and pr...

It is clear that Kafka’s thinking and creations was greatly influenced by Flaubert.Kafka himself claimed that he had some blood relationship with him.He was first led by Flaubert,his spiritual guide,onto the road of realism and naturalism,and then transcended realism and naturalism.Fascinated and directed by him,Kafka blazed a new trail for himself while learning and drawing experiences from his narrative style.He was undoubtedly enlightened by Flaubert’s unique literary style and thus enhanced his self-confidence.

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.

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...

The study of Kafka is a great concern in academic circles both at home and abroad.Most researchers focus their studies on alienated world and absurd theme.But the author holds that Kafka's love is worth studying.This paper attempts to make an analysis of Kafka's diaries,letters,love letters,and his novel to illustrate his love for his motherland and the jewish people,his love for writing as well as his love for his financee and his family.

"Opera in one act with a prelude". - Livret de Paul Bentley adapte du texte original de Franz Kafka. - Version en danois de Karen Hoffmann. - Commande du Royal Danish Opera. - Date de composition : 2001-2003

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.

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.

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 ...

Nietzsche influenced Kafka's thinking and works profoundly. Kafka was the weak, but he was also strong in spirit; Nietzsche was the strong, but he was also weak in healthy. Nietzsche was a philosopher who liked to write with aphorism or allegory, Kafka's works were influenced by it directly and profoundly. Kafka was a prayer who was always in doubts, but Nietzsche was a madman. Kafka did not lost his original thinking and characteristics when he praised and receipted Nietzsche.

Perhaps of all the writers Kafka is the most important to Blanchot. In some way, he defines what literature means to Blanchot. In every period of his work, and in most of his publications of essays and reviews, there is a substantial piece on Kafka (so much so that in French, De Kaf-ka a Kafka, there is a complete edition of them). This article is a personal account of the au-thor’s own encounter with Kafka. It focuses on the subjective experience of literature as how reading deeply affects one’s own sense of self (‘A book,’ Kafka writes, ‘must be the axe for the frozen sea inside of us.’) Wha...

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 ...

Introduction Part 1: Philosophical Investigations Chapter 1: I Don't Want to Know that I Know: The Inversion of Socratic Ignorance in the Knowledge of the Dogs Chapter 2: Kafka's Empty Law: Laughter and Freedom in The Trial Chapter 3: A Kafkan Sublime: Dark Poetics on the Kantian Philosophy Chapter 4: The Everyday's Fabulous Beyond: Nonsense, Parable, and the Ethics of the Literary in Kafka and Wittgenstein Chapter 5: You're nobody 'til somebody loves you: Communication and the Social Destruction of Subjectivity in Kafka's Metamorphosis Chapter 6: Kafka's Insomnia Part 2: Philosophical Topics ...

Preface Acknowledgements List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Introduction 1. Kafka and photography: History of a theoretical configuration 2. From film to photography: Constructing the viewer in the early diaries 3. Der Verschollene: Visions of the New World 4. Photographic metamorphoses: Die Verwandlung 5. Fetishistic exchange: Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer 6. Der Process: The criminological gaze 7. Optics of Power: 'Blumfeld', 'Ein Hungerkunstler', and Das Schloss Conclusion: Kafka the photographer? Bibliography

Kafka was obviously in? uenced in his thinking and works by Dostoevsky.He claimed to have some blood relationship with Dostoevsky.His works teem with an air of the "underground" or "death room" typical of Dostoevsky.The weak characters in Kafka's works are similar to Dostoevsky's "small potatoes".Kafka's doubts,perplexity,misgivings and exploration all had their origins in Dostoevsky.Dostoevsky was a forerunner before Kafka,who,however,took a road that only belonged to himself.

Christo" rätselhaft bleibt. In der Situation der persönlichen Anrede tritt das Problem der Identifizierbarkeit nicht auf. Wo es sich stellt, sind wir aus der existentiellen Situation der Anrede reflektierend längst schon heraus. Deutlicher als im Buch zeigt Dalferth im Aufsatz und in der AnselmStudie, daß er die Schwierigkeit bemerkt. Der Verweis auf Jesus Christus ist ambivalent. Es geht um das am schwersten zu denkende Verhältnis von Wissen und Glauben (vgl. § 104ff). Die fides quaerens intellectum (250f), wie immer sie argumentiert als fides histórica et speculativa, erreicht nur einen prob...

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.

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...

Kafka wrote in the tradition of the great Yiddish storytellers, whose stock-in-trade was bizarre fantasy, tainted with hilarity and self-abasement. What he brought to this tradition was, however, an almost unbearably expanded consciousness. Alienated from his roots, his family, his surroundings, and primarily from his own body, Kafka created a unique literary language in which to hide away, transforming himself into a cockroach, an ape, a dog, a mole or a circus artiste who starves himself to death before admiring crowds. This book, illustrated by the creator of "Fritz the Cat", should help th...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 book will follow a step-by-step tutorial approach which will show the readers how to use Apache Kafka for messaging from scratch, and how Kafka works with other tools like Hadoop, Storm, and so on.