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 day and ours. Taken together these linked essays reveal Kafka in his astonishing many-sidedness.
In this innovative addition to the New Horizons in Leadership Studies series, Leah Tomkins explores Franz Kafka’s expertise in the exercise of power, emphasising his own work as a leader. Through extensive primary research and original translation, she combines literary and philosophical critique with analysis of contemporary figures to craft a manifesto for leadership relations.
This volume is a response to a renewed interest in narrative form in contemporary literary studies, taking up the question of literary narratives and their encounters with modernism and postmodernism within the German-language milieu. Original essays written by scholars of German and Comparative Literature approach the issue of narrative form anew, analyzing the ways in which modernist and postmodernist German-language narratives frame and/or deconstruct historical narratives. Beginning with the German-language modernist author par excellence, Franz Kafka, the volume's essays explore the unique perspective on historical change offered by literature. The authors (Kafka, Kappacher, Goll, Bernhard, Menasse, and Wolf, among others) and works interpreted in the essays included here span the period from before World War I to the post-Holocaust, post-Wall present. Individual essays focus on modernism, postmodernism, narrative theory, and autobiography.
Kafka Translated is the first book to look at the issue of translation and Kafka's work. What effect do the translations have on how we read Kafka? Are our interpretations of Kafka influenced by the translators' interpretations? In what ways has Kafka been 'translated' into Anglo-American culture by popular culture and by academics? Michelle Woods investigates issues central to the burgeoning field of translation studies: the notion of cultural untranslatability; the centrality of female translators in literary history; and the under-representation of the influence of the translator as interpreter of literary texts. She specifically focuses on the role of two of Kafka's first translators, Milena Jesenská and Willa Muir, as well as two contemporary translators, Mark Harman and Michael Hofmann, and how their work might allow us to reassess reading Kafka. From here Woods opens up the whole process of translation and re-examines accepted and prevailing interpretations of Kafka's work.
Mirroring, doubling, imitation, parody, intertextuality. The contributors to this volume — all postgraduate researchers at the time of writing — engage with some of these familiar words to produce articles that deal with the concept of “reflections” in literary and visual culture. Ranging from Italian Golden Age theatre to contemporary French literature and from Cuban film to German fiction, the twelve essays in this volume provide a fresh look at Modern Language Studies, highlighting in particular, the interdisciplinary nature of this field. On one level, the volume speaks to those exploring Modern Language Studies for the first time, for example, undergraduate students, who seek a greater understanding of the dialogue between language and culture. However, the individual essays also have the potential to attract experienced scholars either looking for new knowledge on specialist subjects, or ways of approaching research in Modern Languages. Through its central theme, Reflections: New Perspectives in Modern Languages and Cultures makes some suggestions about the way forward for Modern Language Studies.
This is the acclaimed central volume of the definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Reiner Stach spent more than a decade working with over four thousand pages of journals, letters, and literary fragments, many never before available, to re-create the atmosphere in which Kafka lived and worked from 1910 to 1915, the most important and best-documented years of his life. This period, which would prove crucial to Kafka's writing and set the course for the rest of his life, saw him working with astonishing intensity on his most seminal writings--The Trial, The Metamorphosis, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), and The Judgment. These are also the years of Kafka's fascination with Zionism; of his tumultuous engagement to Felice Bauer; and of the outbreak of World War I. Kafka: The Decisive Years is at once an extraordinary portrait of the writer and a startlingly original contribution to the art of literary biography.
“Refreshingly factual. . . . Here prophet Kafka and quotidian Kafka are not in conflict.” —Zadie Smith, New York Review of Books Franz Kafka is the voice of the outsider at once defined by its affiliations and completely, utterly alone. He was a Jew among Christians, a nonobservant Jew among believers. Louis Begley, himself a multilingual exile and, like Kafka, a lawyer and writer, renders Kafka’s life with sensitivity and insight.
Fresh from the twilight zone of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, this non-academic author treats on a line by line basis two of Kafka's last stories, stories written while he was wheezing with tuberculosis. Not surprisingly, these stories features pipes, just what Kafka was thinking about all the time while he was bed ridden, his sore pipes. Kafka experienced the threat of death at the same time as he experienced the love of his life with Dora Diamant. In these two stories Kafka spot-lights fear and love, the most basic human issues and those that had taken possession of Kafka's life. Fear and love in the lives of a mole-like creature alone in a burrow and mice in a crowded colony. In stories with no humans, Kafka teaches us what is most important in being human. The Burrow examines fear-based isolation of a mole-like creature living all alone in his underground burrow. The only connection with others is fear-based taking, taking by claws and teeth. You are either the diner or dinner, never a guest or host. You are alone but not independent because fear eats your life possibilities independence could give. You are your own worst enemy. Josephine the Singer features love-based giving through art, Kafka's last word on the purpose of art. Like a loving parent giving to her child, the artist mouse Josephine attempts to inspire independent individuality in other mice in the colony through the example of her unique and spontaneous singing. This she gives free of charge. Because of fear of survival stoked by the colony leadership, the rest of the mouse collective hears her singing as a mouse but not as an individual. They remain in fear-based group think with reduced life possibilities. In both stories, the issue is the effect of fear or love on independent individual identity and life possibilities. For Kafka, this was the uber human issue as he prepared to meet his maker.
