Laughing with Kafka After Promethean Shame
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The Atheist's Bible: Diderot's 'Éléments De Physiologie'
The Atheist’s Bible Diderot’s Éléments de physiologie Caroline Warman In off ering the fi rst book-length study of the ‘Éléments de physiologie’, Warman raises the stakes high: she wants to show that, far from being a long-unknown draf , it is a powerful philosophical work whose hidden presence was visible in certain circles from the Revolut on on. And it works! Warman’s study is original and st mulat ng, a historical invest gat on that is both rigorous and fascinat ng. —François Pépin, École normale supérieure, Lyon This is high-quality intellectual and literary history, the erudit on and close argument suff used by a wit and humour Diderot himself would surely have appreciated. —Michael Moriarty, University of Cambridge In ‘The Atheist’s Bible’, Caroline Warman applies def , tenacious and of en wit y textual detect ve work to the case, as she explores the shadowy passage and infl uence of Diderot’s materialist writ ngs in manuscript samizdat-like form from the Revolut onary era through to the Restorat on. —Colin Jones, Queen Mary University of London ‘Love is harder to explain than hunger, for a piece of fruit does not feel the desire to be eaten’: Denis Diderot’s Éléments de physiologie presents a world in fl ux, turning on the rela� onship between man, ma� er and mind. In this late work, Diderot delves playfully into the rela� onship between bodily sensa� on, emo� on and percep� on, and asks his readers what it means to be human in the absence of a soul. -
Prometheus and Pygmalion." Critical Practice: Philosophy and Creativity
McQuillan, Martin. "Prometheus and Pygmalion." Critical Practice: Philosophy and Creativity. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 113–137. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 30 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472544391.0010>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 30 September 2021, 00:48 UTC. Copyright © Martin McQuillan 2019. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 4 Prometheus and Pygmalion In the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells the stories of two possible models for the relation between philosophy and creativity.1 They are two of the foundational myths of our understanding of art and civilization, the tales of Prometheus and Pygmalion. In this chapter, we will look at both stories with a view to better understanding the paradoxes of critical practice, each tale providing us with a different point of entry to the complexities of artistic practice and philosophical thought. The story of Prometheus has its fullest elaboration in Hesiod’s Theogony and we will attend to this tale in the second half of the chapter.2 The myth of Pygmalion also has several versions including many neoclassical and more contemporary re-tellings.3 The stories represent two different paradigms for creation, although they contain overlapping elements. The case of Prometheus is a model for creation that emphases theft and punishment, while the story of Pygmalion offers us an account of creation based upon illusion and misidentification. The former is a tale of inscription and disruption, the latter myth concerns representation and misreading. -
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. -
Of the Castle Chinmaya Lal Thakur Graduate Researcher Depart
Kafka Beyond the Kafkaesque: Reading Laughter in the ‘Dystopia’ of The Castle Chinmaya Lal Thakur Graduate Researcher Department of Creative Arts and English La Trobe University, Melbourne Abstract: Franz Kafka’s fiction has been read as presenting instances of especially deprived subjectivities. Kafka’s protagonists are seen as being alienated from others around them. They are uncritical servants of tyrannical bureaucratic organizations and offer no resistance to the frightening impact of the forces of power, technological surveillance, and domination that constitute the episteme that they inhabit. Their situation, to put it succinctly, is Kafkaesque- defined by the Merriam Webster dictionary as “of, relating to, or suggestive of Franz Kafka or his writings; especially having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.” The present paper argues that Kafka adopts an ironical attitude towards his protagonists as they seek to control the accidents and surprises, they encounter in their lives and render them manageable. It reads K.’s meeting with the official Burgel from the Castle in Kafka’s The Castle (1926) as being an instance of an accidental and humorous situation that critiques the metaphysical dualities characterizing human existence - such as freedom and determination- by reflecting ironically on them. This humor is of course humor at the expense of the protagonist, but it is also humoring that points to the (futile) human endeavor of seeking to achieve absolute freedom in the world. The paper, thus, attempts to establish an association between Kafka’s ironical attitude towards K. in The Castle and the critique of the nightmarish, terrifying, and ultimately dystopian aspects of Cartesian modernity that such an attitude leads to. -
EXISTENTIAL CRISIS in FRANZ Kl~Fkl:T
EXISTENTIAL CRISIS IN FRANZ Kl~FKl:t. Thesis submitted to the University ofNor~b ~'!e:n~al for the award of the Degree of Doctor of Ph.Ho§'Ophy. By Miss Rosy Chamling Department of English University of North Bengal Dist. Darjeeling-7340 13 West Bengal 2010 gt)l.IN'tO rroit<. I • NlVERSITY OF NORTH BENGAL P.O. NORTH BENGAL UNIVERSITY, HEAD Raja Rammohunpur, Dist. Da~eeling, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH West Bengal, India, PIN- 734013. Phone: (0353) 2776 350 Ref No .................................................... Dated .....?.J..~ ..9 . .7.: ... ............. 20. /.~. TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN This is to certify that Miss Rosy Cham!ing has completed her Research Work on •• Existential Crisis in Franz Kafka". As the thesis bears the marks of originality and analytic thinking, I recommend its submission for evaluation . \i~?~] j' {'f- f ~ . I) t' ( r . ~ . s amanta .) u, o:;.?o"" Supervis~r & Head Dept. of English, NBU .. Contents Page No. Preface ......................................................................................... 1-vn Acknowledgements ...................................................................... viii L1st. ot~A'b o -rev1at1ons . ................................................................... 1x. Chapter- I Introduction................................................... 1 1 Chapter- II The Critical Scene ......................................... 32-52 Chapter- HI Authority and the Individual. ........................ 53-110 Chapter- IV Tragic Humanism in Kafka........................... 111-17 5 Chapter- V Realism -
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. -
Animal Studies Ecocriticism and Kafkas Animal Stories 4
Citation for published version: Goodbody, A 2016, Animal Studies: Kafka's Animal Stories. in Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. Handbook of English and American Studies, vol. 2, De Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 249-272. Publication date: 2016 Document Version Peer reviewed version Link to publication University of Bath Alternative formats If you require this document in an alternative format, please contact: [email protected] General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 26. Sep. 2021 Animal Studies: Kafka’s Animal Stories Axel Goodbody Franz Kafka, who lived in the city of Prague as a member of the German-speaking Jewish minority, is usually thought of as a quintessentially urban author. The role played by nature and the countryside in his work is insignificant. He was also no descriptive realist: his domain is commonly referred to as the ‘inner life’, and he is chiefly remembered for his depiction of outsider situations accompanied by feelings of inadequacy and guilt, in nightmarish scenarios reflecting the alienation of the modern subject. Kafka was only known to a small circle of when he died of tuberculosis, aged 40, in 1924. However, his enigmatic tales, bafflingly grotesque but memorably disturbing because they resonate with readers’ own experiences, anxieties and dreams, their sense of marginality in family and society, and their yearning for self-identity, rapidly acquired the status of world literature after the Holocaust and the Second World War. -
Franz Kafka - Quotes
Franz Kafka - Quotes It is the thousandth forgetting of a dream dreamt a thousand times and forgotten a thousand times, and who can damn us merely for forgetting for the thousandth time? - Investigations Of A Dog Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations. - Investigations Of A Dog So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being. - Investigations Of A Dog You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. - Journals My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication--it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness--it is all that i have--and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well. - Journals A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us. - Journals A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it. - Journals Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old. - Journals By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. - Journals In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies. -
The Fragments Around Franz Kafka's “A Report to an Academy”
humanities Article Narrative Transformed: The Fragments around Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” Doreen Densky Department of German, New York University, 19 University Place, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10003, USA; [email protected] Academic Editor: Joela Jacobs Received: 7 February 2017; Accepted: 6 April 2017; Published: 10 April 2017 Abstract: Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy”, in which the ape-turned-human Rotpeter provides a narrative account of his life, has been scrutinized with regard to its allegorical, scientific, and historical implications. This article shifts the focus toward the narrative set-up by closely reading the transformation that can be traced in the sequence of several narrative attempts found in Kafka’s manuscripts. Analyzing the fragments around this topic, I show how Kafka probes different angles—from a meeting between a first-person narrator and Rotpeter’s impresario and a dialogue between the narrator and Rotpeter, via the well-known “Report” itself, on to a letter by one of Rotpeter’s former teachers—that reveal a narrative transformation equally important as the metamorphosis from animal to human. The focus on the narrative constellations and on the lesser-known constitutive margins of the “Report” help to better understand, moreover, the complex relationship between immediacy and mediation, the ethnological concern of speech for the self and the unknown animal other, and poetological questions of production, representation, and reception. Keywords: animal narrators; human-animal studies; Franz Kafka; manuscripts; speaking-for; narrative representation; literary representation 1. Introduction Franz Kafka’s famous text narrated by an ape who has become human, “A Report to an Academy” (“Ein Bericht für eine Akademie”), was penned one hundred years ago, in 1917 [1–5]. -
Hybrid Monsters
HYBRID MONSTERS IN THE CLASSICAL WORLD THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF HYBRID MONSTERS IN GREEK MYTHOLOGY, LITERATURE AND ART by Liane Posthumus Thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Philosophy in Ancient Cultures at the University of Stellenbosch Supervisor: Prof. J.C. Thom Co-supervisor: Dr. S. Thom Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Department of Ancient Studies March 2011 Declaration By submitting this thesis electronically, I declare that the entirety of the work contained therein is my own, original work, that I am the authorship owner thereof (unless to the extent explicitly otherwise stated) and that I have not previously in its entirety or in part submitted it for obtaining any qualification. Date: 28 February 2011 Copyright © 2010 University of Stellenbosch All rights reserved i ABSTRACT The aim of this thesis is to explore the purpose of monster figures by investigating the relationship between these creatures and the cultures in which they are generated. It focuses specifically on the human-animal hybrid monsters in the mythology, literature and art of ancient Greece. It attempts to answer the question of the purpose of these monsters by looking specifically at the nature of man- horse monsters and the ways in which their dichotomous internal and external composition challenged the cultural taxonomy of ancient Greece. It also looks at the function of monsters in a ritual context and how the Theseus myth, as initiation myth, and the Minotaur, as hybrid monster, conforms to the expectations of ritual monsters. The investigation starts by considering the history and uses of the term “monster” in an attempt to arrive at a reasonable definition of monstrosity. -
The Project Gutenberg Ebook of Bulfinch's Mythology: the Age of Fable, by Thomas Bulfinch
The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bulfinch's Mythology: The Age of Fable, by Thomas Bulfinch This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: Bulfinch's Mythology: The Age of Fable Author: Thomas Bulfinch Posting Date: February 4, 2012 [EBook #3327] Release Date: July 2002 First Posted: April 2, 2001 Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BULFINCH'S MYTHOLOGY: AGE OF FABLE *** Produced by an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer. BULFINCH'S MYTHOLOGY THE AGE OF FABLE Revised by Rev. E. E. Hale CONTENTS Chapter I Origin of Greeks and Romans. The Aryan Family. The Divinities of these Nations. Character of the Romans. Greek notion of the World. Dawn, Sun, and Moon. Jupiter and the gods of Olympus. Foreign gods. Latin Names.-- Saturn or Kronos. Titans. Juno, Vulcan, Mars, Phoebus-Apollo, Venus, Cupid, Minerva, Mercury, Ceres, Bacchus. The Muses. The Graces. The Fates. The Furies. Pan. The Satyrs. Momus. Plutus. Roman gods. Chapter II Roman Idea of Creation. Golden Age. Milky Way. Parnassus. The Deluge. Deucalion and Pyrrha. Pandora. Prometheus. Apollo and Daphne. Pyramus and Thisbe. Davy's Safety Lamp. Cephalus and Procris Chapter III Juno. Syrinx, or Pandean Pipes. Argus's Eyes. Io. Callisto Constellations of Great and Little Bear. Pole-star. Diana. Actaeon. Latona. Rustics turned to Frogs. Isle of Delos. Phaeton. -
Prof. Michael G. Levine Fall 2015 172 College Avenue 01:470:388:01 Office Hours: Tuesdays, 4:30-6Pm 01:195:395:01 Tel
Prof. Michael G. Levine Fall 2015 172 College Avenue 01:470:388:01 Office Hours: Tuesdays, 4:30-6pm 01:195:395:01 Tel. 732-932-7201 Hardenbergh Hall B2 (T) [email protected] Hardenbergh Hall A4 (TH) TTh5 2:30-4:10 Love Letters Course Description: An examination of the intimacies, estrangements, enigmas and vagaries of love through the correspondence of a number of famous men and women of letters. Our exploration of the epistolary genre will range between private letters and published literary works and seek to read the one in conjunction with the other. Of particular concern will be structures of direct and indirect address, the use of pet names and invention of secret codes and idioms, the materiality of the letter and the postal network, epistolary conventions, and the ties through which poetry, philosophy, literature, personal and public correspondence are themselves intimately bound. Readings include selections from the letters of Friedrich Hölderlin and Susette Gontard (Diotima), Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer, Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, Walter Benjamin and Gretel Karplus Adorno. We will also read epistolary novels, poetry, criticism, and philosophical works by Goethe, Hölderlin, Celan, Bachmann, Barthes, Derrida, Siegert, and Benjamin. Discussion in English; all readings available in English translation and also in the original German or French whenever relevant. Books to be purchased at Rutgers University Bookstore Gateway Transit Bldg - 100 Somerset Street: Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther ISBN 978-0-19-958302-7 Correspondence (Seagull Books) by Celan, Paul, Bachman, Ingeborg 2010 Correspondence Walter Benjamin and Gretel Adorno ISBN 13: 978074569023 Derrida, The Post Card, ISBN 13: 978-0226143224 Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial 0-8052-0705-8 Sakai https://sakai.rutgers.edu/portal/site/7ecf7c27-beb7-4696-9844-faed103a2ec9 All other readings available on course website on Sakai When accessing this material it is necessary to use your RU Eden account address.