Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Kafka’s Works by Year of First Appearance, With Date of First English Translation
- Abbreviations of Kafka’s Works
- Introduction: Kafka Begins
- Critical Editions I: The 1994 Paperback Edition
- Critical Editions II: Will the Real Franz Kafka Please Stand Up?
- Beyond Self-Assertion: A Life of Reading Kafka
- Kafka before Kafka: The Early Stories
- Tradition and Betrayal in “Das Urteil”
- Kafka as Anti-Christian: “Das Urteil,” “Die Verwandlung,” and the Aphorisms
- Kafka’s Aesthetics: A Primer: From the Fragments to the Novels
- Medial Allusions at the Outset of Der Proceß; or, res in media
- Kafka’s Circus Turns: “Auf der Galerie” and “Erstes Leid”
- Kafka and Postcolonial Critique: Der Verschollene, “In der Strafkolonie,” “Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer”
- Disjunctive Signs: Semiotics, Aesthetics, and Failed Mediation in “In der Strafkolonie”
- Hunting Kafka Out of Season: Enigmatics in the Short Fictions
- A Dream of Jewishness Denied: Kafka’s Tumor and “Ein Landarzt”
- Surveying The Castle: Kafka’s Colonial Visions
- Making Everything “a little uncanny”: Kafka’s Deletions in the Manuscript of Das Schloß and What They Can Tell Us About His Writing Process
- Kafka Imagines His Readers: The Rhetoric of “Josefine die Sängerin” and “Der Bau”
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Beyond Self-Assertion: A Life of Reading Kafka
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Kafka’s Works by Year of First Appearance, With Date of First English Translation
- Abbreviations of Kafka’s Works
- Introduction: Kafka Begins
- Critical Editions I: The 1994 Paperback Edition
- Critical Editions II: Will the Real Franz Kafka Please Stand Up?
- Beyond Self-Assertion: A Life of Reading Kafka
- Kafka before Kafka: The Early Stories
- Tradition and Betrayal in “Das Urteil”
- Kafka as Anti-Christian: “Das Urteil,” “Die Verwandlung,” and the Aphorisms
- Kafka’s Aesthetics: A Primer: From the Fragments to the Novels
- Medial Allusions at the Outset of Der Proceß; or, res in media
- Kafka’s Circus Turns: “Auf der Galerie” and “Erstes Leid”
- Kafka and Postcolonial Critique: Der Verschollene, “In der Strafkolonie,” “Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer”
- Disjunctive Signs: Semiotics, Aesthetics, and Failed Mediation in “In der Strafkolonie”
- Hunting Kafka Out of Season: Enigmatics in the Short Fictions
- A Dream of Jewishness Denied: Kafka’s Tumor and “Ein Landarzt”
- Surveying The Castle: Kafka’s Colonial Visions
- Making Everything “a little uncanny”: Kafka’s Deletions in the Manuscript of Das Schloß and What They Can Tell Us About His Writing Process
- Kafka Imagines His Readers: The Rhetoric of “Josefine die Sängerin” and “Der Bau”
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
THE INTENT OF THIS NARRATIVE is to give, through one individual reader’s response, a view of the kind of impact Kafka’s unique and epochal achievement has had, and thus to contribute toward an understanding of its nature and significance.
Fantastic Mimesis
The work that opened my access to Kafka was “Die Verwandlung” (The Metamorphosis), which I first read as a refugee in New York in 1941. As I have learned since then, it is the text by Kafka that has opened his world to many other readers. Its impact was overwhelming. It changed my life and determined my choice of profession, since I embarked upon the study of literature, and German literature in particular, to get to know the secret of Kafka’s power and to have the opportunity to preoccupy myself with his writings. Through the study of the literature to which he belonged, at least linguistically, I hoped to acquire a key to the enigma of his work.
The enormous effect “Die Verwandlung” had on me was first of all based on identification with its main character’s situation. The text literally captivated me, in the sense that it kept me emotionally glued to the deplorable position of its protagonist. I suffered and agonized in Gregor’s place. Suppose, I asked myself, an analogous fate should happen to me? Empirically it was inconceivable, but the persuasive magic of Kafka’s story made it appear by no means certain that something like it could not happen to myself, or to anyone for that matter. Even if I would not turn literally into a bug, could I not get into the same kind of absolute isolation, turn into an object of horrendous disgust, beneath even the contempt reserved for human beings? The Second World War was raging. Couldn’t I be transformed by mutilation into a thing like Gregor? And, if not by war, by some accident, or by the disfiguring effects of disease? And even if the cause of quarantining might not be physical, could it not be some mental or moral lapse, or any stroke of outrageous fortune, that might make me exactly like Gregor? Horrifying uniqueness was not limited to individuals.
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- A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka , pp. 33 - 60Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2002