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
Hunting Kafka Out of Season: Enigmatics in the Short Fictions
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
IN THE PREFACE TO THE 1995 English edition of his 1990 philosophical work Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art, Mario Perniola asks the following questions about our own state at the end of the twentieth century:
What is the fear that is taking hold of our feelings in this end of the millennium? What troubles and confounds our experience and reason? What is it that threatens, intimidates and terrifies us? Is it something dreadful coming back from the past, something that we wrongly believed had been completely subdued, but that now reemerges to drag us back to the insecurity and danger we thought we had escaped forever? Or is it something totally new that shakes and dissolves all our certainties, throwing open before us unpredictable, unthinkable horizons where the very notions of humankind and nature appear to crumble? What do we fear most? Repetition or difference? The return of a barbarism that is remote and prehistoric or the advent of a barbarism that is technological and post-human? (vii)
Perniola goes on to explain that the questions themselves are not an enigma — they simply express a fear; enigma emerges when the two poles of these questions, the world of the past and the world of the future, pass into one another without border — when they are “collapsed into an ambiguous, supremely problematic present” (vii).
This sense of an extremely problematic present is the basis of much of the anxiety that we sense when reading the works of Franz Kafka. Whether read as modern, postmodern, existential, surreal, or what you will, Kafka’s works have been interpreted to explain ways of looking at the present moment, whenever that present moment occurred, be it 1925, 1965, or 2000. Because Kafka indicated no precise dates in his stories, and because his stories are not set in any definite time, their characters tend to be interpreted by readers as actors in an always present. The working conditions portrayed in “Die Verwandlung” (The Metamorphosis) or Der Proceß (The Trial), though seemingly antiquated by modern computerized office standards, do not locate the works historically.
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- A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka , pp. 247 - 262Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2002
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