“The Castle” by Franz Kafka as a Prefiguration of Dystopia (original) (raw)
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MATERIALI DI ESTETICA. TERZA SERIE N. 4.2 2017, 2017
This is the first translation of Brod’s text which was originally published on the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” on 22.10.1965. This edition, compared with the one in “The Prague Circle” (1966), also presents a new translation of Kafka’s only known aesthetical fragment of 1906 upon the experience of beauty and novelty, two elements which play a salient role in the whole of his narrative. Brod’s suggestions as well as Kafka’s counterarguments encompass the process of knowledge thus developing peculiar points of view upon subjectivity and creative processes. German-Jewish Cultural Studies and Philosophy; German Literature; Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism; Intermediality and Intertextuality are here to be reckoned with KEY-WORDS Franz Kafka – Max Brod – Aesthetical Pleasure – Beauty – Novelty - Narratives – “psicologico” instead of “physiologisch” – Representational Processes - Body as Involved in Writing Strategies Aesthetics – Fiction – Creative Processes – Beauty – Novelty – Arguments vs Counterarguments; Intermediality; Intertextuality; Max Brod – Franz Kafka
Panopticism and the Construction of Power in Franz Kafka's the Castle
Papers on Language Literature, 2007
the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless [.. .]" (Bentham 34, emphasis original). Nor did he limit his plans to a carceral structure or correctional facilities, either, but went even further by formulating a utopian vision of a Panopticon town as a self-sustaining unit of production that would include factories, schools, churches, and hospitals. Following utilitarian principles, Bentham sought to conflate a moral purpose with notions of productivity in a model whose final aims were "punishment, reformation and pecuniary economy" (Bentham 50). 2 Written in 1922, and published posthumously in 1926, Franz Kafka's The Castle portrays a world seemingly controlled by whimsical leaders and absurd rules. As K., land-surveyor and unwelcome guest in the village near the Castle, endeavors to reach his goals-the Castle itself and the elusive Director Klamm-questions arise regarding the ultimate source of power, the means of rule-enforcement, and the terms of the relationship between villagers and officials in the prison-like world created by Kafka. Regardless of who or what is in control of the Castle, of the village, and of K.'s actions, the power structures are kept in place by the pervasive fear of a ubiquitous bureaucratic system and by the threat of a punishment that is seldom actually administered or experienced. In his analysis of The Castle, Michael Löwy asks, "what if the Castle did not symbolize something else but was just a castle, that is to say the seat of an earthly authority?" (50). 3 Thus Löwy points to the need to produce interpretations of the novel that do not rely exclusively on symbolic or allegorical meanings. This article seeks to identify those structural elements that enable 2 Much of the debate on Bentham's aims, as Simon Werret notes, has focused on "the extent to which Bentham's program for a rational, utilitarian society was motivated by a concern for humanitarian reform or more sinister disciplinary interests." Here, I subscribe to the first view. 3 Löwy argues that "the 'Castle' embodies Power, Authority, State, as against the common people, represented by the 'Village'" (50).
-173 KAFKAESQUE AWE, MENACE AND POWER RELATIONS IN THE CASTLE
The term Kafkaesque inherits the confusion, distortion, surreal, absurdity and sense of foreboding. The elements of terror and awe are well developed and articulated through the characters and critical situations in which they are placed by Kafka. Fredrick Robert in his work Franz Kafka: Represented Man states that Kafkaesque is more about mysticism, unknown power and human fear. It constitutes the numerous characteristics such as distortion of time and space, unavoidable sense of menace and foreboding and also the mechanism of panopticon. Kafka's approach to the novels is censorious: he artistically left his characters in implausible situation that bring out the inexplicable reality of the modern world. Kafkaesque also encompasses the sexual and political repression that lead to the acquisition of framework within which the notion of awe and menace is panopticized. The structure of power that framed the term Kafkaesque is critiqued through Foucault's work Discipline and Punishment. Kafkaesque is symbolic of mundane world that seemed complex, irrational, unjust and oppressed. Kafka has created the world that consists of humans who endured the pain excreted from the labyrinth of terror and menace. The repressed sexuality is an essential characteristic that structured the term Kafkaesque distortions, considering the historical representation of Kafka's personal experiences it is anatomized through Foucault's History of sexuality. Therefore surreal events that draft the Kafkaesque bring out the quirks of reality representing the modern world constantly proliferate the sense of awe and menace in contrast to the mysterious world of Kafka
Neophilologus, 1993
The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to reread," says Albert Camus in his famous essay on the Absurd (124). Camus attributes this to the ambiguity and symbolic character of Kafka's works, which challenge the reader to adopt a hermeneutic approach, and reread the stories time after time from a new angle, trying to determine their meaning. But this is hardly a complete explanation of the special feeling aroused by Kafka's writing and the strange attraction that draws one again to the same text to repeat a similar Kafkaesque experience. Kafka's works are indeed highly ambiguous and contain dense symbols that constitute an integral part of their universe; and, certainly, "the symbol gives rise to thought" as Ricoeur says (299). It invites interpretation and, so to speak, inspires the hermeneutic reading as a necessary correlative of its symbolic nature. Critics have therefore abundantly analyzed Kafka's text, meticulously probing his imagery, plots, heroes and tortuous thinking, in a consistent attempt to decipher his symbols and suggest some sort of explanatory key-whether a sociological, psychological, mythical or philosophical key in the spirit of the traditional approaches which, over the years, have characterized criticism of the Kafka text, or a self-referential recta-linguistic or recta-poetic key according to the demands of the structuralist and post-structuralistic criticism which began to be published during the seventies. It should be pointed out that side by side with "purist" critics who continue to present traditional unified interpretations, 2 there is a growing new approach of heterogeneous criticism based on methodological pluralism. This recent approach is developing a multi-directional interpretation (sometimes even at the cost of the consistency and coherence of the critical discourse itself) which aims at giving expression to the various levels and areas of significance that, according to these critics, the Kafka text simultaneously directs itself towards. 3 But the attempt to interconnect extremely different interpretations within one line of interpretative argument, sometimes leads the critical text to begin itself to resemble (in the suggestive metaphors which characterize its style and in its patterns of ambiguous images) the symbolic text whose task it is to interpret? Some critics, despairing of translating Kafka's universe into rational modes of thinking, have preferred "to approach the drama through its appearance and the novel through its form" (Camus 124). They warn the reader against the tendency to treat Kafka as an "unsuccessful philosopher in need of someone to explain him" (Magny 163) and suggest a
Franz Kafka and His Prague Contexts: Studies in Language and Literature
Franz Kafka and His Prague Contexts: Studies in Language and Literature, 2016
Franz Kafka is by far the Prague author most widely read and admired internationally. However, his reception in Czechoslovakia, launched by the Liblice conference in 1963, has been conflicted. While rescuing Kafka from years of censorship and neglect, Czech critics of the 1960s “overwrote” his German and Jewish literary and cultural contexts in order to focus on his Czech cultural connections. Seeking to rediscover Kafka’s multiple backgrounds, in Franz Kafka and His Prague Contexts Marek Nekula focuses on Kafka’s Jewish social and literary networks in Prague, his German and Czech bilingualism, and his knowledge of Yiddish and Hebrew. Kafka’s bilingualism is discussed in the context of contemporary essentialist views of a writer’s “organic” language and identity. Nekula also pays particular attention to Kafka’s education, examining his studies of Czech language and literature as well as its role in his intellectual life. The book concludes by asking how Kafka “read” his urban environment, looking at the readings of Prague encoded in his fictional and non-fictional texts.
Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language traces the writer Franz Kafka’s interest in modern art and visual culture. Examining Kafka’s relationship to visuality, the book explores the diversity of images that surrounded Kafka in his home city of Prague—a heterogeneous and multilingual metropolis whose visual environment shaped his everyday experiences. It maps how Kafka engaged with local painting and sculpture, architecture, and monuments, and also with an array of popular visual media and phenomena from illustrated magazines and advertising to film, photography, dance, and cabaret. Kafka’s attention to the modern visual culture of his era was reflected in his writings and in his interest in drawing, a practice in which he received preliminary training and which he took up in his free time during his years as a university student. The monograph is published on the occasion of the centennial of Kafka's death and in association with the exhibition Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language at the Gallery of West Bohemia in Pilsen (5 June–28 October 2024). It is also available in a Czech edition edited by Marie Rakušanová. The book is available for pre-order in North America through Distributed Art Publishers: https://www.artbook.com/9788074374265.html
Utopia, Modernism, and Failure: On Franz Kafka’s Impossibilities
Cultural Critique 123, 2024
With few exceptions, Franz Kafka’s work has been read as deeply dystopian. This essay undertakes an examination of Kafka’s references to the utopian imaginary, from his Diaries to the Zürau Notebooks, and from the story “Fellowship” to Amerika and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”, demonstrating that Kafka was both conscious of and interested in the rhetoric associated with utopian (or “intentional”) communities and in the parameters of utopia as a genre of writing. Rather than either advocating or rejecting utopia/nism, Kafka uses it as a means through which to develop, within his writing, a way of investigating the social and ideological problem of community—particularly acute for him as a multiply estranged European Jew—and the aesthetic problems of impossibility and failure.