Kafka: modernism and intimacy (original) (raw)
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2016
Often have we heard of Kafka’s writings to be existentialist, but there are certain aspects of his writings which resist such labelling. Dr. Mallikarjun Patil in Franz Kafka and Literary Modernism* claims him to be neo-romanticist, expressionist and surrealist. Martin Esslin opines Kafka’s works to be the embodiment of modern man’s anxiety, dread and purposelessness. Theodor Adorno Claims in Prisms* that most of the critical writings which were written on him count little, as most of them are existential in nature. Kafka’s writings cannot be assimilated into one established theory. His writings are not black and white. Things are grey, only very much. Attention needs to be paid to those grey areas. The aim of this analysis is to interpret how his writings are a blend of aspects of modernity and “Kafkaesque” – a very unique circumstantial situation into which his characters are locked while Kafka has thrown the key away. Kafkaesque is an aspect of modernity but at the same time it is an addendum to it. It enlarges the scope of modernity and widens its very margin. The following analysis is primarily about the aspect of modernity that can be found in Franz Kafka’s writings. It is an attempt to find the nature of modernism at work in some of his selected works. In order to get a sense of that we need to have a closer look at modernism and modernity.
Kafka of the Diaries:The Fragmented Self of an Alienated Man
Identity and Meaning are problematic in the Kafka of the Diaries because the reflections therein illustrate a person with a fragmented self-image. This paper traces the trajectory of this problem in the authors Diaries. This is part of the research I'm doing for my Ph. D. in Human Development.
Franz Kafka: Modernism, Modernity, Myth, and Religion
Ken Seigneur (ed.), A Companion to World Literature. Wiley 2020. Vol. 5b: 1920 to Early Twenty-First Century II, , 2020
This chapter outlines those features of Kafka's work which mark his specific contribution to modernist narration. Section 1 describes his prototypical narrative model as a combination of fantastic writing, parabolic narration, and internal focalization. Section 2 discusses three social models that he uses for his critique of modernity. Section 3 considers Kafka's modernist use of myth as a placeholder for a lost religious dimension of life.
2015
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.’) What is most important about Blanchot’s description of literature, de-spite the fact that we might attempt to turn it back into another theory, is that the book is an en-counter between the author and the work, which continually escapes them, and the reader, who through reading, is transformed and changed forever. It is this alteration that is the ‘truth’ of literature, rather than any description...
Kafka und die kleine Prosa der Moderne / Kafka and Short Modernist Prose. Ed. by Manfred Engel and Ritchie Robertson (Oxford Kafka Studies; 1), 2011
Short prose was the form Kafka favoured for many of his most important works. It was also the medium of much innovatory Modernist writing in the period 1900-33. The essays in this volume investigate Kafka’s short prose in relation to that written by his contemporaries (including Nietzsche, Robert Walser, Döblin, Benn, Musil, Broch), thus helping to locate Kafka more precisely within the literary context of his time.
The Society and Individual : Kafka On The Shore
Multiple realities and individual choice in the "Postmodern Bildungsroman": Kafka on the Shore Haruki Murakami"s work of fiction is considered to be the representative of Japanese Postmodern fiction. this paper will consider Kafka on the Shore as the primary text to showcase how this novel is a novel of individual choice. This paper also will try to analyse how this is novel about a personal tale of development in a postmodern world. In this paper I would also like to discuss how parallel and multiple realities are used as a narrative strategy to this "Postmodern Bildungsroman" to push the limits of human subjectivity.
Vagaries of Desire: A Collection of Philosophical Essays, 2019
Desire is a major collection of new essays by Timo Airaksinen on the philosophy of desire. The first part develops a novel account of the philosophical theory of desire, including Girard. The second part discusses Kafka's main works, namely The Castle, The Trial, and Amerika, and Thomas Hobbes and the problems of intentionality. The text develops such linguistic tropes as metaphor and metonymy in connection with topics like death and then applies them to Kafka's texts. The third part makes an effort to understand the mysteries of sadism and masochism in philosophical and rhetorical terms. The last article criticizes Thomas Nagel's influential account of sexual perversion and develops a viable alternative"-Provided by publisher.