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Author: Clayton Koelb
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2010-08-19
Total Pages: 193
ISBN-13: 082649580X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKStudent guide to Franz Kafka, focusing on giving guidance through the difficulties readers can encounter in studying his work.
Author: Casey Rentmeester
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2022-02-02
Total Pages: 337
ISBN-13: 1538154145
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAlthough philosophers have examined and commented on music for centuries, Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, had frustratingly little to say about music—directly, at least. This volume, the first to tackle Heidegger and music, features contributions from philosophers, musicians, educators, and musicologists from many countries throughout the world, aims to utilize Heidegger’s philosophy to shed light on the place of music in different contexts and fields of practice. Heidegger’s thought is applied to a wide range of musical spheres, including improvisation, classical music, electronic music, African music, ancient Chinese music, jazz, rock n’ roll, composition, and musical performance. The volume also features a wide range of philosophical insights on the essence of music, music’s place in society, and the promise of music’s ability to open up new ways of understanding the world with the onset of the technological and digital musical age. Heidegger and Music breaks new philosophical ground by showcasing creative vignettes that not only push Heidegger’s concepts in new directions, but also get us to question the meaning of music in various contexts.
Author: Clayton Koelb
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2010-06-17
Total Pages: 193
ISBN-13: 1441171576
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFranz Kafka is one of the most widely taught, and read, writers in world literature. Readers encountering texts like 'The Metamorphosis' and The Trial for the first time are frequently perplexed by his often intentionally weird writing. Some might say that Kafka's enduring achievement has been to make his readers love being perplexed. As much of Kafka's writing is designed to perplex the reader, this guide helps the reader understand why and how perplexity has been deliberately created by Kafka's text and to realize what the uses of such perplexity might be. The book guides readers through their first encounters with Kafka and introduces the problems involved in reading his texts, the nature of his texts from the key novels and novellas to letters and professional writings, his life as a writer and different approaches to reading Kafka.
Author: Naama Harel
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2020-04-14
Total Pages: 217
ISBN-13: 0472126512
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNonhuman figures are ubiquitous in the work of Franz Kafka, from his early stories down to his very last one. Despite their prominence throughout his oeuvre, Kafka’s animal representations have been considered first and foremost as mere allegories of intrahuman matters. In recent years, the allegorization of Kafka’s animals has been poetically dismissed by Kafka’s commentators and politically rejected by posthumanist scholars. Such critique, however, has yet to inspire either an overarching or an interdiscursive account. This book aims to fill this lacuna. Positing animal stories as a distinct and significant corpus within Kafka’s entire poetics, and closely examining them in dialogue with both literary and posthumanist analysis, Kafka’s Zoopoetics critically revisits animality, interspecies relations, and the very human-animal contradistinction in the writings of Franz Kafka. Kafka’s animals typically stand at the threshold between humanity and animality, fusing together human and nonhuman features. Among his liminal creatures we find a human transformed into vermin (in “The Metamorphosis”), an ape turned into a human being (in “A Report to an Academy”), talking jackals (in “Jackals and Arabs”), a philosophical dog (in “Researches of a Dog”), a contemplative mole-like creature (in “The Burrow”), and indiscernible beings (in “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People”). Depicting species boundaries as mutable and obscure, Kafka creates a fluid human-animal space, which can be described as “humanimal.” The constitution of a humanimal space radically undermines the stark barrier between human and other animals, dictated by the anthropocentric paradigm. Through denying animalistic elements in humans, and disavowing the agency of nonhuman animals, excluding them from social life, and neutralizing compassion for them, this barrier has been designed to regularize both humanity and animality. The contextualization of Kafka's animals within posthumanist theory engenders a post-anthropocentric arena, which is simultaneously both imagined and very real.
Author: Allen Thiher
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Published: 2018-01-15
Total Pages: 314
ISBN-13: 1611178290
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn analysis of the life of the eccentric author of The Trial, and his quest for meaning in his work. Franz Kafka is without question one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century despite the fact that much of his work remained unpublished when he died at a relatively young age in 1924. Kafka’s eccentric methods of composition and his diffident attitude toward publishing left most of his writing to be edited and published after his death by his literary executor, Max Brod. In Understanding Franz Kafka, Allen Thiher addresses the development of Kafka’s work by analyzing it in terms of its chronological unfolding, emphasizing the various phases in Kafka’s life that can be discerned in his constant quest to find a meaning for his writing. Thiher also shows that Kafka’s work, frequently self-referential, explores the ways literature can have meaning in a world in which writing is a dubious activity. After outlining Kafka’s life using new biographical information, Thiher examines Kafka’s first attempts at writing, often involving nearly farcical experiments. The study then shows how Kafka’s work developed through twists and turns, beginning with the breakthrough stories “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis,” continuing with his first attempt at a novel with Amerika, and followed by Kafka’s shifting back and forth between short fiction and two other unpublished novels, The Trial and The Castle. Thiher also calls on Kafka’s notebooks and diaries to help demonstrate that he never stopped experimenting in his attempt to find a literary form that might satisfy his desire to create some kind of transcendental text in an era in which the transcendent is at best an object of nostalgia or of comic derision. In short, Thiher contends, Kafka constantly sought the grounds for writing in a world in which all appears groundless.
Author: Carolin Duttlinger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018
Total Pages: 365
ISBN-13: 1107085497
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAccessible essays place Kafka in historical, political and cultural context, providing new and often unexpected perspectives on his works.
Author: Brendan Moran
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2013-04-19
Total Pages: 300
ISBN-13: 0739180908
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPhilosophy and Kafka is a collection of original essays interrogating the relationship of literature and philosophy. The essays either discuss specific philosophical commentaries on Kafka’s work, consider the possible relevance of certain philosophical outlooks for examining Kafka’s writings, or examine Kafka’s writings in terms of a specific philosophical theme, such as communication and subjectivity, language and meaning, knowledge and truth, the human/animal divide, justice, and freedom.
Author: Jennifer L. Geddes
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 2016-04-30
Total Pages: 251
ISBN-13: 0810132915
DOWNLOAD EBOOKKafka's Ethics of Interpretation refutes the oft-repeated claim, made by Kafka's greatest interpreters, including Walter Benjamin and Harold Bloom, that Kafka sought to evade interpretation of his writings. Jennifer L. Geddes shows that this claim about Kafka's deliberate uninterpretability is not only wrong, it also misconstrues a central concern of his work. Kafka was not trying to avoid or prevent interpretation; rather, his works are centrally concerned with it. Geddes explores the interpretation that takes place within, and in response to, Kafka's writings, and pairs Kafka's works with readings of Sigmund Freud, Pierre Bourdieu, Tzvetan Todorov, Emmanuel Levinas, and others. She argues that Kafka explores interpretation as a mode of power and violence, but also as a mode of engagement with the world and others. Kafka, she argues, challenges us to rethink the ways we read texts, engage others, and navigate the world through our interpretations of them.
Author: Steven Earnshaw
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2006-11-07
Total Pages: 193
ISBN-13: 1441194991
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExistentialism is often studied by students with little or no background in philosophy; either as an introduction to the idea of studying philosophy or as part of a literary course. Although it is often an attractive topic for students interested in thinking about questions of 'self' or 'being', it also requires them to study difficult thinkers and texts. This Guide for the Perplexed begins with the question of 'What is Existentialism?' and then moves on to provide a brief analysis of the key thinkers, writers and texts - both philosophical and literary - central to existentialism. Chapters focus particularly on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus but also discuss other philosophers and writers such as Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Kafka. The second section of the Guide introduces key topics associated with existentialist thought; Self, Consciousness, the question of God and Commitment. Each chapter explains the concepts and debates and provides guidance on reading and analysing the philosophical and literary texts addressed, focusing throughout on clarifying the areas students find most difficult
Author: David Suchoff
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2011-11-29
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 0812205243
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAfter Franz Kafka died in 1924, his novels and short stories were published in ways that downplayed both their author's roots in Prague and his engagement with Jewish tradition and language, so as to secure their place in the German literary canon. Now, nearly a century after Kafka began to create his fictions, Germany, Israel, and the Czech Republic lay claim to his legacy. Kafka's Jewish Languages brings Kafka's stature as a specifically Jewish writer into focus. David Suchoff explores the Yiddish and modern Hebrew that inspired Kafka's vision of tradition. Citing the Jewish sources crucial to the development of Kafka's style, the book demonstrates the intimate relationship between the author's Jewish modes of expression and the larger literary significance of his works. Suchoff shows how "The Judgment" evokes Yiddish as a language of comic curse and examines how Yiddish, African American, and culturally Zionist voices appear in the unfinished novel, Amerika. In his reading of The Trial, Suchoff highlights the black humor Kafka learned from the Yiddish theater, and he interprets The Castle in light of Kafka's involvement with the renewal of the Hebrew language. Finally, he uncovers the Yiddish and Hebrew meanings behind Kafka's "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-Folk" and considers the recent legal case in Tel Aviv over the possession of Kafka's missing manuscripts as a parable of the transnational meanings of his writing.
