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
A Dream of Jewishness Denied: Kafka’s Tumor and “Ein Landarzt”
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
FRANZ KAFKA KNEW HIS FREUD. In complicated ways he grew up and into the age of Freud. Much as the surrealists such as Max Ernst and André Breton “invented” Freud, finding in Freud “scientific” proof of their own manner of seeing the world, Kafka too created his own Freud. And Freud in his deepest fantasies about the psyche invented the world in which Ernst and Breton and Kafka could be imagined. Like Freud’s own “dream book,” which Kafka read and annotated, Kafka’s diaries are full of real, invented, or desired dreams (see Sokel and Born). Indeed, in complex ways and in spite of his struggle with psychoanalysis, Kafka’s fascination with the dream as a key to his own internal life remained consistent over his adult life. But as often as not Kafka’s dreams (like that of Gregor Samsa) were waking dreams: “Ich kann nicht schlafen. Nur Träume kein Schlaf” (T 567; I can’t sleep. Only dreams, no sleep) he wrote on 21 July 1913 (cited in Guidice and Müller 18). These waking dreams are constructed from what Freud calls “day residue,” the images left over from daily experience. Kafka knew this category and wrote on 11 February 1914 to Grete Bloch: “Diese Art Schlaf, die ich habe, ist mit oberflächlichen, durchaus nicht phantastischen, sondern das Tagesdenken nur aufgeregter wiederholenden Träumen durchaus wachsamer und anstrengender als das Wachen” (LFFE 18; This type of sleep I have is superficial, truly not fantastic, rather constructed from the thoughts of day; they are exciting, repetitious dreams that are more lively and exhausting than being awake). On 22 March 1922 Kafka entered into his diary the following dream: “Nachmittag Traum vom Geschwür an der Wange. Die fortwährend zitternde Grenze zwischen dem gewöhnlichen Leben und dem scheinbar wirklicheren Schrecken” (T 913; In the afternoon a dream of a tumor on the cheek. The continually trembling border between the normal life and the seemingly more real horror). Let us imagine with Kafka where such a dream can be located within the world of culture and dreaming of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
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- A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka , pp. 263 - 280Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2002