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1 the Threats of Sleep In
Emergence: A Journal of Undergraduate Literary Criticism and Creative Research 1 COPYRIGHT NOTICE. Quotations from this article must be attributed to the author. Unless otherwise indicated, copyright for this article belongs to the author, who has granted Emergence first-appearance, non-exclusive rights of publication. The Threats of Sleep in ''The Metamorphosis'' Rebecca Chenoweth Kafka's writings are often lauded for their treatment of the absurd. In ''The Metamorphosis,'' this absurdity is most visible in Gregor Samsa's transformation into a giant insect, but most tellingly also expresses itself in his attitude toward his transformation. In a text that deals so closely with the inversion of the dream-like and reality, Gregor's relationship to sleep speaks volumes about the nature of his metamorphosis. When engaging the theme of sleep in Kafka's works, literary critics have often examined its ''dream-like'' elements, as well as Kafka's own relationship to sleep. This paper examines a third perspective on this theme: the role of sleep as a physical act, and what it reveals about Gregor's state. Gregor sees sleep at times as the cause of and other times as a possible cure for his metamorphosis. His inability to sleep is a troubling indicator that he is losing his grip on life and humanity after his transformation, but his relationship to sleep before the metamorphosis shows how long he has really been dehumanized. Most literary criticism that treats the theme of sleep in ''The Metamorphosis'' focuses on the ways in which it is ''dream-like.'' As is the case with most of Kafka's writings, Gregor's story is often described in terms of a nightmare, despite its being explicitly presented as ''no dream'' (Kafka 89). -
An Unheard, Inhuman Music: Narrative Voice and the Question of the Animal in Kafka's “Josephine, the Singer Or the Mouse
humanities Article An Unheard, Inhuman Music: Narrative Voice and the Question of the Animal in Kafka’s “Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk” Kári Driscoll Department of Languages, Literature, and Communication, Utrecht University, Utrecht 3512 JK, The Netherlands; [email protected] Academic Editor: Joela Jacobs Received: 28 March 2017; Accepted: 26 April 2017; Published: 3 May 2017 Abstract: In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida wonders whether it would be possible to think of the discourse of the animal in musical terms, and if so, whether one could change the key, or the tone of the music, by inserting a “flat”—a “blue note” in other words. The task would be to render audible “an unheard language or music” that would be “somewhat inhuman” but a language nonetheless. This essay pursues this intriguing proposition by means of a reading Kafka’s “Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk,” paying careful attention to the controversy regarding the status of Josephine’s vocalizations, which, moreover, is mirrored in the scientific discourse surrounding the ultrasonic songs of mice. What is at stake in rendering this inhuman music audible? And furthermore, how might we relate this debate to questions of narrative and above all to the concept of narrative “voice”? I explore these and related questions via a series of theoretical waypoints, including Paul Sheehan, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy, with a view to establishing some of the critical parameters of an “animal narratology,” and of zoopoetics more generally. Keywords: narrative voice; inoperativity; singing mice; zoopoetics; anthropological machine; community; music Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on —Keats 1. -
Modernist Permabulations Through Time and Space
Journal of the British Academy, 4, 197–219. DOI 10.5871/jba/004.197 Posted 18 October 2016. © The British Academy 2016 Modernist perambulations through time and space: From Enlightened walking to crawling, stalking, modelling and street-walking Lecture in Modern Languages read 19 May 2016 ANNE FUCHS Fellow of the Academy Abstract: Analysing diverse modes of walking across a wide range of texts from the Enlightenment period and beyond, this article explores how the practice of walking was discovered by philosophers, educators and writers as a rich discursive trope that stood for competing notions of the morally good life. The discussion proceeds to then investigate how psychological, philosophical and moral interpretations of bad prac- tices of walking in particular resurface in texts by Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and the interwar writer Irmgard Keun. It is argued that literary modernism transformed walking from an Enlightenment trope signifying progress into the embodiment of moral and epistemological ambivalence. In this process, walking becomes an expression of the disconcerting experience of modernity. The paper concludes with a discussion of walking as a gendered performance: while the male walkers in the modernist texts under discussion suffer from a bad gait that leads to ruination, the new figure of the flâneuse manages to engage in pleasurable walking by abandoning the Enlightenment legacy of the good gait. Keywords: modes of walking, discursive trope, Enlightenment discourse, modernism, modernity, moral and epistemological ambivalence, gender, flâneuse. Walking on one’s two legs is an essential but ordinary skill that, unlike cycling, skate-boarding, roller-skating or ballroom dancing, does not require special proficiency, aptitude or thought—unless, of course, we are physically impaired. -
Complete Stories by Franz Kafka
The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka Back Cover: "An important book, valuable in itself and absolutely fascinating. The stories are dreamlike, allegorical, symbolic, parabolic, grotesque, ritualistic, nasty, lucent, extremely personal, ghoulishly detached, exquisitely comic. numinous and prophetic." -- New York Times "The Complete Stories is an encyclopedia of our insecurities and our brave attempts to oppose them." -- Anatole Broyard Franz Kafka wrote continuously and furiously throughout his short and intensely lived life, but only allowed a fraction of his work to be published during his lifetime. Shortly before his death at the age of forty, he instructed Max Brod, his friend and literary executor, to burn all his remaining works of fiction. Fortunately, Brod disobeyed. The Complete Stories brings together all of Kafka's stories, from the classic tales such as "The Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony" and "The Hunger Artist" to less-known, shorter pieces and fragments Brod released after Kafka's death; with the exception of his three novels, the whole of Kafka's narrative work is included in this volume. The remarkable depth and breadth of his brilliant and probing imagination become even more evident when these stories are seen as a whole. This edition also features a fascinating introduction by John Updike, a chronology of Kafka's life, and a selected bibliography of critical writings about Kafka. Copyright © 1971 by Schocken Books Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Schocken Books Inc., New York. Distributed by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. The foreword by John Updike was originally published in The New Yorker. -
Introduction
Guston, Philip Guston 9/8/10 6:04 PM Page 1 INTRODUCTION DORE ASHTON “Create, artist! Don’t talk!” the aging Goethe counseled his contemporaries in 1815. The painter Degas seconded the old sage when he told the young poet Paul Valéry that when the muses finished their day’s work they didn’t talk, they danced. But then, as Valéry vividly recalled, Degas went on to talk of his own art for hours on end. Painters have always talked, and some, such as Delacroix, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich, and Motherwell, also wrote. Certain painters, Goya, for example, also deftly used language to augment their imagery. Like Degas, who liked to talk with poets and even engaged the inscrutable Mallarmé, Guston liked talking with poets, and they with him. Among his most attentive listeners was his friend the poet Clark Coolidge, whose ear was well attuned to Guston’s sometimes arcane utterances and who has selected some of the painter’s most eloquent sessions of writing and talking, resulting in a mosaic of a life - time of thought. I was also one of Guston’s interlocutors for almost thirty years. I recognize with pleasure Coolidge’s unfurling of Guston’s cycles of talk and non-talk; his amusing feints and dodges when confronted with obtuse questioners, his wondrous bursts of language when he felt inspired, his sometimes playful contrariness, his satisfaction in being a provocateur, and his consistent preoccupation with serious aesthetic ques - tions through out his working life as a painter. Above all, I recognize Guston’s funda - mental rebelliousness, which manifested itself not only in his artistic preferences but in his politics, his choice of artistic battlefields, and his intimate studio life. -
The Marriage Contract in Fine Art
The Marriage Contract in Fine Art BENJAMIN A. TEMPLIN* I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................ 45 II. THE ARTIST'S INTERPRETATION OF LAW ...................................... 52 III. THE ARNOLFINI MARRIAGE: CLANDESTINE MARRIAGE CEREMONY OR BETROTHAL CONTRACT? .............................. ........................ .. 59 IV. PRE-CONTRACTUAL SEX AND THE LAWYER AS PROBLEM SOLVER... 69 V. DOWRIES: FOR LOVE OR MONEY? ........................ ................ .. .. 77 VI. WILLIAM HOGARTH: SATIRIC INDICTMENT OF ARRANGED MARRIAGES ...................................................................................... 86 VII. GREUZE: THE CIVIL MARRIAGE CONTRACT .................................. 93 VIII.NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURY COMPARISONS ................ 104 LX . C ONCLUSION ..................................................................................... 106 I. INTRODUCTION From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, several European and English artists produced paintings depicting the formation of a marriage contract.' The artwork usually portrays a couple-sometimes in love, some- * Associate Professor, Thomas Jefferson School of Law. For their valuable assis- tance, the author wishes to thank Susan Tiefenbrun, Chris Rideout, Kathryn Sampson, Carol Bast, Whitney Drechsler, Ellen Waldman, David Fortner, Sandy Contreas, Jane Larrington, Julie Kulas, Kara Shacket, and Dessa Kirk. The author also thanks the organizers of the Legal Writing Institute's 2008 Summer Writing Workshop -
Kafka and the Postmodern Divide: Hebrew and German in Aharon Appelfeld’S the Age of Wonders (Tor Ha-Pela’Ot)
THE GERMANIC REVlEW Kafka and the Postmodern Divide: Hebrew and German in Aharon Appelfeld’s The Age of Wonders (Tor Ha-pela’ot) DAVID SUCHOFF uch recent cultural criticism has argued that postmodern culture can be di- M agnosed as an unworked-through period of mourning, unable to come to terms with the Holocaust and the definitive break with modernist categories that it represents.’ Aharon Appelfeld’s Hebrew novella The Age of Wonders (1978) portrays the story of an assimilated Jewish writer and his family in Austria be- fore the Holocaust, and the story of his son Bruno, who returns to Austria from Jerusalem after the war in search of his past. The text’s very structure seems to affirm the traditional categories of the modedpostmodern divide. Bruno’s father seems to represent the formalism of modernist fiction and its paradigmatic eth- nic self-denial. As the Holocaust draws near in the first half of the novella, Jew- ish history is truly the nightmare from which the writer, as the “father” of Bruno’s apparently rootless, postmodern fate, unsuccessfully tries to awaken. “Father” (his only consistent name in the novella) constantly seeks to become an “Austrian writer,” with German as his “only language” and “mother tongue,” while critics constantly racialize him as a Jew and compare his writing to Kafka’s “parasitism” and unhealthy Jewish style.2 “Father” seems to represent classical modernism, struggling to break with the mass and enter elite culture, only to con- front the question of Jewish culture in its own terms, and those of its enemies, everywhere he turns. -
Kafka's Anti-Wagnerian Philosophy Of
53 (2/2019), pp. 109–123 The Polish Journal DOI: 10.19205/53.19.6 of Aesthetics Ido Lewit* “He Couldn’t Tell the Difference between The Merry Widow and Tristan and Isolde”: Kafka’s Anti-Wagnerian Philosophy of Music Abstract This essay exposes an anti-Wagnerian philosophy of music in Franz Kafka’s “Researches of a Dog” and “The Silence of the Sirens.” Themes of music, sound, and silence are over- whelmingly powerful in these stories and cannot be divorced from corporeal and visual aspects. These aspects are articulated in the selected texts in a manner that stands in stark opposition to Richard Wagner’s philosophy of music as presented in the composer’s sem- inal 1870 “Beethoven” essay. Keywords Richard Wagner, Franz Kafka, Philosophy of Music, Transcendence, Acousmatic Sound, Silence Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s close friend and literary executor, recalls in his bi- ography of the author that Kafka once said that “he couldn’t tell the differ- ence between The Merry Widow and Tristan and Isolde” (1995, 115). Brod evokes this memory in order to exemplify Kafka’s supposed lack of musi- cality. Indeed, for a German-speaking intellectual such as Kafka, not being able to differentiate Franz Lehár’s light operetta from Richard Wagner’s solemn, monumental music-drama would not simply be an example of unmusicality, but a symptom of cultural autism. While Brod’s recollection is sssssssssssss * Yale University Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Program in Film and Media Studies Email: [email protected] 110 I d o L e w i t __________________________________________________________________________________________________ the only documented reference by Kafka to Wagner or his works,1 it does not necessarily follow that Kafka was unaware of Wagner’s views of music and its effects. -
Common Sayings and Expressions in Kafka Hartmut Binder
Document generated on 09/25/2021 10:25 p.m. TTR Traduction, terminologie, re?daction Common Sayings and Expressions in Kafka Hartmut Binder Kafka pluriel : réécriture et traduction Volume 5, Number 2, 2e semestre 1992 URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/037123ar DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/037123ar See table of contents Publisher(s) Association canadienne de traductologie ISSN 0835-8443 (print) 1708-2188 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this article Binder, H. (1992). Common Sayings and Expressions in Kafka. TTR, 5(2), 41–105. https://doi.org/10.7202/037123ar Tous droits réservés © TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction — Les auteurs, This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit 1992 (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ Common Sayings and Expressions in Kafka Hartmut Binder Translation by Iris and Donald Bruce, University of Alberta "Bild, nur Büd"1 [Images, only images] Proverbial sayings are pictorially formed verbal phrases2 whose wording, as it has been handed down, is relatively fixed and whose meaning is different from the sum of its constituent parts. As compound expressions, they are to be distinguished from verbal metaphors; as syntactically dependant constructs, which gain ethical meaning and the status of objects only through their embedding in discursive relationships, they are to be differentiated from proverbs. -
The Individual and the «Spiritual» World in Kafka's Novels
Studies in 20th Century Literature Volume 3 Issue 1 Article 3 8-1-1978 The Individual and the «Spiritual» World in Kafka's Novels Ulrich Fülleborn Universitat Erlangen-Niirnberg Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl Part of the German Literature Commons, and the Modern Literature Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Fülleborn, Ulrich (1978) "The Individual and the «Spiritual» World in Kafka's Novels," Studies in 20th Century Literature: Vol. 3: Iss. 1, Article 3. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1057 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in 20th Century Literature by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Individual and the «Spiritual» World in Kafka's Novels Abstract Following an earlier essay by the same author on 'Perspektivismus und Parabolik' in Kafka's shorter prose pieces, this article gives a description of the structure of Kafka's novels in terms of the concepts 'the individual' (cf. Kierkegaard's 'individuals') and 'the spiritual world' (Kafka: «There is no world but the spiritual one»). Joseph K. and the land-surveyor K. become individuals by leaving the world of everyday life and passing over into the incomprehensible spiritual world of trials and a village-castle community, in the same way that Karl Rossmann had passed over into the 'Nature-theatre of Oklahoma' before them. And they remain as individuals, since in this world they struggle to hold their own. -
Marriage in the 21St Century: from a State of Confusion to a State of Being Gemma Margaret Anne Barriteau
Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Summer 1-1-2016 Marriage in the 21st Century: From a State of Confusion to a State of Being Gemma Margaret Anne Barriteau Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Barriteau, G. (2016). Marriage in the 21st Century: From a State of Confusion to a State of Being (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/88 This One-year Embargo is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. LIVED EXPERIENCES OF MARRIAGE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: FROM A STATE OF CONFUSION TO A STATE OF BEING A Dissertation Submitted to the School of Education Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Gemma M. Barriteau August 2016 Copyright by Gemma M. Barriteau 2016 DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF EDUCATION Department of Counseling, Psychology and Special Education Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Executive Counselor Education and Supervision Program Presented by: Gemma M. Barriteau B.A., Deviant Behavior & Social Control M.S.Ed., Community Mental Health Counseling August 2016 LIVED EXPERIENCES OF MARRIAGE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: FROM A STATE OF CONFUSION TO A STATE OF BEING Approved by: _____________________________________________, Chair Lisa Lopez Levers, Ph.D. Professor of Counselor Education Department of Counseling, Psychology, and Special Education School of Education Duquesne University ___________________________________________, Member James E. -
The Complete Stories
The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at the end Back Cover : "An important book, valuable in itself and absolutely fascinating. The stories are dreamlike, allegorical, symbolic, parabolic, grotesque, ritualistic, nasty, lucent, extremely personal, ghoulishly detached, exquisitely comic. numinous and prophetic." -- New York Times "The Complete Stories is an encyclopedia of our insecurities and our brave attempts to oppose them." -- Anatole Broyard Franz Kafka wrote continuously and furiously throughout his short and intensely lived life, but only allowed a fraction of his work to be published during his lifetime. Shortly before his death at the age of forty, he instructed Max Brod, his friend and literary executor, to burn all his remaining works of fiction. Fortunately, Brod disobeyed. Page 1 The Complete Stories brings together all of Kafka's stories, from the classic tales such as "The Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony" and "The Hunger Artist" to less-known, shorter pieces and fragments Brod released after Kafka's death; with the exception of his three novels, the whole of Kafka's narrative work is included in this volume. The remarkable depth and breadth of his brilliant and probing imagination become even more evident when these stories are seen as a whole. This edition also features a fascinating introduction by John Updike, a chronology of Kafka's life, and a selected bibliography of critical writings about Kafka. Copyright © 1971 by Schocken Books Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Schocken Books Inc., New York. Distributed by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.