Franz Kafka
Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 465 g
ISBN: 978-0-691-12780-4
Verlag: Princeton University Press
On the night of September 22, 1912, Franz Kafka wrote his story "The Judgment," which came out of him "like a regular birth." This act of creation struck him as an unmistakable sign of his literary destiny. Thereafter, the search of many of his characters for the Law, for a home, for artistic fulfillment can be understood as a figure for Kafka's own search to reproduce the ecstasy of a single night. In Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, the preeminent American critic and translator of Franz Kafka traces the implications of Kafka's literary breakthrough. Kafka's first concern was not his responsibility to his culture but to his fate as literature, which he pursued by exploring "the limits of the human." At the same time, he kept his transcendental longings sober by noting--with incomparable irony--their virtual impossibility. At times Kafka's passion for personal transcendence as a writer entered into a torturous and witty conflict with his desire for another sort of transcendence, one driven by a modern Gnosticism. This struggle prompted him continually to scrutinize different kinds of mediation, such as confessional writing, the dream, the media, the idea of marriage, skepticism, asceticism, and the imitation of death. Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka concludes with a reconstruction and critique of the approaches to Kafka by such major critics as Adorno, Gilman, and Deleuze and Guattari.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
Preface xi
Abbreviations for Kafka Citations xvii
Introduction: Beginnings 1
Chapter 1
In the Circle of "The Judgment" 13
Chapter 2
The Trial: The Guilt of an Unredeemed Literary Promise 37
Segue I
On Cultural Immortality 45
Chapter 3
Medial Interferences in The Trial 51
Or, res in Media
Chapter 4
Allotria and Excreta in "In the Penal Colony" 67
Segue II
Death and the Medium 81
Chapter 5
Nietzsche, Kafka, and Literary Paternity 94
Chapter 6
Something to Do with the Truth 111
Kafka's Later Stories
Chapter 7
"A Faith Like a Guillotine" 126
Kafka on Skepticism
Chapter 8
Kafka and the Dialect of Minor Literature 142
Chapter 9
Adorno's "Notes on Kafka" 158
A Critical Reconstruction
Chapter 10
On Translation Mistakes, with Special Attention to Kafka in Amerika 176
Chapter 11
The Trouble with Cultural Studies 194
Notes 205
Acknowledgments 253
Index 255
