CHAPTER-IV Tragic Humanism in Kafka
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
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. -
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. -
Laughing with Kafka After Promethean Shame
PROBLEMI INTERNATIONAL,Laughing with vol. Kafka 2, no. 2,after 2018 Promethean © Society for Shame Theoretical Psychoanalysis Laughing with Kafka after Promethean Shame Jean-Michel Rabaté We have learned that Kafka’s main works deploy a fully-fledged political critique whose main weapon is derision.1 This use of laughter to satirize totalitarian regimes has been analyzed under the name of the “political grotesque” by Joseph Vogl. Here is what Vogl writes: From the terror of secret scenes of torture to childish officials, from the filth of the bureaucratic order to atavistic rituals of power runs a track of comedy that forever indicates the absence of reason, the element of the arbitrary in the execution of power and rule. How- ever, the element of the grotesque does not unmask and merely denounce. Rather it refers—as Foucault once pointed out—to the inevitability, the inescapability of precisely the grotesque, ridicu- lous, loony, or abject sides of power. Kafka’s “political grotesque” displays an unsystematic arbitrariness, which belongs to the func- tions of the apparatus itself. […] Kafka’s comedy turns against a diagnosis that conceives of the modernization of political power as 1 This essay is a condensed version of the second part of Kafka L.O.L., forthcoming from Quodlibet in 2018. In the first part, I address laughter in Kaf- ka’s works, showing that it takes its roots in the culture of a “comic grotesque” dominant in Expressionist German culture. Günther Anders’s groundbreaking book on Kafka then highlights the political dimensions of the work while criti- cizing Kafka’s Promethean nihilism. -
Oral History Interview with Edward B. Thomas, 1983 April 28-May 10
Oral history interview with Edward B. Thomas, 1983 April 28-May 10 Funding for the digital preservation of this interview was provided by a grant from the Save America's Treasures Program of the National Park Service. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Edward B. Thomas on April 28 & May 10, 1983. The interview took place in Seattle, Washington, and was conducted by John Olbrantz for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Interview DATE: APRIL 28, 1983 [Tape 1] JOHN OLBRANTZ: Ed, can you tell me a little bit about your background, where you were born, your early childhood experiences, your parents, who your father was, who your mother was, how they came to live in this part of the country? EDWARD THOMAS: Well, I was born in Cosmopolis, Washington, and many times when I've come through customs, when I was much younger and especially at the Mexican border, they would say, "Where were you born?" and I'd say, "Cosmopolis, Washington," they'd say, "Look, bud! Don't get funny with us." (laughter) But there actually is such a place as Cosmopolis, Washington. Nobody had any particular influence upon me, I would say, in my younger years as far as becoming interested in art, and particularly teaching art. I had a very severe illness when I was four and five years old and was confined to bed a lot, and so people brought me tablets and color crayons and pencils and stuff like that. -
David Foster Wallace
across the state of Illinois sat at their desks, depend on what communication-theorists curled over their pencils, stuck their tongues sometimes call "exformation," which is a cer- .between their teeth, and wrote five-paragraph tain quantity of vital information removed from essays about wearing uniforms to school. All but evoked by a communication in such a way except one. His essay began, "I never thought as to cause a kind of explosion of associative much about dancin' circles before today, but if connections within the recipient. This is prob- that's what you want to know about, well, here ably why the effect of both short stories and goes ... " And somewhere in North Carolina, jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like some poor soul will reach into the stack of 500 the venting of a long-stuck valve. It's not for essays she will have to read that day. Four hun- nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as "a dred and ninety-nine will be about wearing hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas uniforms, and one won't. It will be "off topic." inside us." Nor is it an accident that the tech- The IGAP rules say that it must receive the nical achievement of great short stories is often lowest possible score. But I wish I could watch called "compression"-for both the pressure her face when she reads that first line. If she and the release are already inside the reader. keeps reading and smiles, I know there might What Kafka seems able to do better than just be hope for us. -
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. -
Absurdity and Instability in the Works of Franz Kafka and Harold Pinter
AT THE EDGE OF BEING: ABSURDITY AND INSTABILITY IN THE WORKS OF FRANZ KAFKA AND HAROLD PINTER Adam W. Cheshire A Thesis Submitted to the University of North Carolina Wilmington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of English University of North Carolina Wilmington 2008 Approved by Advisory Committee Nicholas Laudadio Michael Wentworth Paula Kamenish Chair Accepted by _______________________________ Dean, Graduate School Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………. iii I. Creative Essence: Absurdity and the Artist……………………………………….. 1 II. Setting the Sights: Distortion and Destruction ……………………………………. 9 III. Community Watch: Perception and Power….…………………………………….. 23 IV. Memory: Seeing What‟s Not There……………………………………………….. 32 V. ….Esque…………………………………………………………………………… 44 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………….. 47 ii Abstract The thematic similarities between the works of Franz Kafka and Harold Pinter have become a fruitful topic for critical discussion over the last few decades. In this essay I discuss what I see as one of the most important themes of Kafka and Pinter‟s writing: the instability of the human condition. Through the depiction of absurd interactions between characters, as well as the fragmented and distorted environments that pervade their works, Kafka and Pinter create a tension that resonates deep within the reader and the audience. My analysis of the techniques employed by Kafka and Pinter to create this unnerving tension is intended to illustrate the unique artistry these two writers share, and show why they have come to be seen as the literary representatives of the fractured and uncertain world of modern times. Using a definition of the literary absurd as that which challenges the expected notions of human action and interaction, I delve into the way Kafka and Pinter depict the absurd in their works, and how it reveals the instability of the human condition. -
Excellence in Advocacy: a Victim-Centered Approach
OHIO FAMILY VIOLENCE PREVENTION CENTER OFFICE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE SERVICES A DIVISION OF THE OHIO DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY Excellence in Advocacy: A Victim-Centered Approach 2010 Message from the Executive Director of the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services The Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services (OCJS), the lead criminal justice planning agency for the State of Ohio, is pleased to provide this publication, Excellence in Advocacy: A Victim- Centered Approach. This publication was developed through a collaboration of the Family Violence Prevention Center (FVPC) and the Family Violence Prevention Center Advisory Council. The FVPC Advisory Council consists of criminal justice experts from around the state who work on domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence and stalking issues. Excellence in Advocacy: A Victim-Centered Approach, is part of our continuing effort to educate and enhance services of professionals in the field. This publication, while helpful for all victim advocates, was specifically designed for victim advocates who have been in the field five years or less. The publication includes information on the following topics: • What is advocacy? • National/State Code of Conduct for advocates • Unauthorized practice of law • Picking your battles • Legal remedies • Safety planning • Emerging issues The success of this publication is not possible without the collaborative efforts of FVPC and its partners in the victim advocacy field. It is my hope that Excellence in Advocacy: A Victim-Centered Approach will serve as a valuable resource for victim advocates and service providers as they work towards safety, education and awareness for victims/survivors of crime and enhancing public safety in Ohio. -
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]. -
The British Navy from Within
THE BRITISH NAVY FROM WITHIN BY "LOWER DECK." ll(llilMIHIIIIIIIMIHiHi||i)IWII»IIIHI(lllill^aMipF-'#' Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/britishnavyfromwOOexrorich Hodder & Stougl)ton*s War Publications General Yon Bernhardi HOW GERMANY MAKES WAR. By General Von Bernhardi 2/' net (paper) I 2/6 net (cloth). CAVALRY. By General Von Bernhardi. 2/' net (paper) ; 2/6 net (cloth). " Diiifofm with Bemhardi's " How Germany Makes War THE REALITY OF WAR. A companion to ** Clauscwitz." By Major Stewart L. Murray. 2/' net (paper) j 2/6 net (cloth). THE NATION IN ARMS. By Field^Marshal Von der Goltz. 2}' net (paper) j 2/6 net (cloth). THE GERMAN ARMY FROM WITHIN. By a British Officer who has served in it. 2/- net (paper) ; 2J6 net (cloth). THE RUSSIAN ARMY FROM WITHIN. By one who knows it from the inside. 2/^ net (paper); 2/6 net (cloth). THE BRITISH ARMY FROM WITHIN. By one who has served in it. 2/' net (paper) j 2/6 net (cloth). THE BRITISH NAVY FROM WITHIN. 2/^ net (paper); 2/6 net (cloth). THE FRENCH ARMY FROM WITHIN. By-Ex^Trooper.** 2/' net (paper) J 2/6 net (cloth). THE GERMAN SPY SYSTEM FROM WITHIN. 2/. net (paper) ; 2/6 net (cloth). THE CZAR AND HIS PEOPLE. 2/- net (paper) ; 2/6 net (cloth). The French View of Modern War. FRANCE AND THE NEXT WAR, By Commandant J. Colin. 2/' net (paper); 2/6 net (cloth). THE BRITISH NAVY FROM WITHIN Hoddgr & Stougl)ton*s War Publications The "Daily Telegraph" War Books Price One Shilling each net, cloth.