Franz Kafka

Why read literature?

What does it mean to "interpret" a text?

Medium vs. Message

1. the message, the content (what is said?)

2. the medium, the form (how is it said?)

Literature delivers and encodes its message in different ways

significance of form, media, genre, audience

Franz Kafka

• Born in Prague, part of Austro-Hungarian Empire
• A German-language writer of novels, stories, and parables
• From a family of middle-class Jews
• Ordered his friend and literary executor to burn all of his work
• Lived a psychologically tortured and anxious life

"Kafkaesque"
A situation in which an individual is at the mercy of a comically absurd logic that they don't understand

Short Stories

• "Description of a Struggle"
• "The Judgment"
• "The Metamorphosis"
• "In the Penal Colony"
• "A Hunger Artist"

Common Motif:
Alienation from Authority

PARABLE: allegorial or metaphorical story (often told to convey a spiritual or moral lesson)

PARABLE (Greek origin) "to cast by the side of" "to throw alongside"

"there is the picture-side of the parable...and the meaning of application"
- Amos Wilder

Before the Law

The Torah, or Jewish Written Law = the first 5 books of the Bible

scribes in the scriptorium

Protestant Revolution

Imperial Message

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08.21.14

Common Themes

• Alienation, anxiety, and loneliness
• Father-son conflict, especially guilt
• Physical and psychological brutality
• Endless labyrinths of bureacracy
• Elusive power of authority and law
• The quest for metaphysical truth
• The surreal logic of dreams

Parables and Paradoxes

PRAGUE
Division between Czech and German-speaking people

KAFKA'S JEWISHNESS
"What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe"

Kafka's Law Experience

• He studied law to please his father
• After his education, he performed unpaid service as a law clerk
• He later found employment with insurance companies
• Complained about his work hours, which left little time to write

KAFKA ON WRITING
“You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind. . . . Thai is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough."

A Tortured Soul
"Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible within himself, though both that indestructible something and his own trust in it may remain permanently concealed from him.”