Franz Kafka In Context

Accessible essays place Kafka in historical, political and cultural context, providing new and often unexpected perspectives on his works.

Franz Kafka is by far the Prague author most widely read and admired internationally. However, his reception in Czechoslovakia, launched by the Liblice conference in 1963, has been conflicted. While rescuing Kafka from years of censorship and neglect, Czech critics of the 1960s “overwrote” his German and Jewish literary and cultural contexts in order to focus on his Czech cultural connections. Seeking to rediscover Kafka’s multiple backgrounds, in Franz Kafka and His Prague Contexts Marek Nekula focuses on Kafka’s Jewish social and literary networks in Prague, his German and Czech bilingualism, and his knowledge of Yiddish and Hebrew. Kafka’s bilingualism is discussed in the context of contemporary essentialist views of a writer’s organic language and identity. Nekula also pays particular attention to Kafka’s education, examining his studies of Czech language and literature as well as its role in his intellectual life. The book concludes by asking how Kafka read his urban environment, looking at the readings of Prague encoded in his fictional and nonfictional texts. ‘Nekula’s work has had a major impact on our understanding of Kafka’s relation to the complex social, cultural and linguistic environment of early twentieth‑century Prague. While little of this work has been available in English until now, the present volume translates many of his most important studies, and includes revisions and expansions appearing now for the first time. Nekula challenges stubborn clichés and opens important new perspectives: readers interested in questions relating to Kafka and Prague will find this an essential and richly rewarding book.’ – Peter Zusi, University College London ‘Marek Nekula’s important book originally situates Franz Kafka within his Pragueand Czech contexts. It critically examines numerous distortions that accompanied the reception of Kafka, starting with the central issue of Kafka’s languages(Kafka’s Czech, Prague German), and the ideological discourse surrounding the author in communist Czechoslovakia. Astute and carefully argued, Franz Kafka and his Prague Contexts offers new perspectives on the writings of the Prague author. This book will benefit readers in German and Slavic Studies, in Comparative Literature, and History of Ideas.’ – Veronika Tuckerová, Harvard University Marek Nekula připravil soubor studií o tom, jak Praha formovala Kafkovu osobnost a dílo. Kniha začíná kritickou diskuzí o problematickém přijímání Franze Kafky v Československu, které začalo na konferenci v Liblici v roce 1963. Zde byl Kafka zachráněn před cenzurou za cenu "přepsání" jeho německého a židovského literárního a kulturního kontextu s cílem vyzdvihnout český vliv na jeho tvorbu. Studie se zaměřují na židovské sociální a literární prostředí v Praze, Kafkovu německo-českou dvojjazyčnost a jeho znalost jidiš a hebrejštiny. Kafkův bilingvismus je probírán v kontextu současných esencialistických názorů na spisovatelův jazyk a identitu. Nekula také věnuje zvláštní pozornost Kafkovu vzdělání, zkoumá jeho studia českého jazyka a literatury, jakož i jeho českou četbu a její roli v jeho intelektuálním životě. Knihu uzavírá otázkou, jak Kafka „četl“ své městské prostředí.

In Stanley Corngold’s view, the themes and strategies of Kafka’s fiction are generated by a tension between his concern for writing and his growing sense of its arbitrary character. Analyzing Kafka’s work in light of "the necessity of form," which is also a merely formal necessity, Corngold uncovers the fundamental paradox of Kafka’s art and life. The first section of the book shows how Kafka’s rhetoric may be understood as the daring project of a man compelled to live his life as literature. In the central part of the book, Corngold reflects on the place of Kafka within the modern tradition, discussing such influential precursors of Cervantes, Flaubert, and Nietzsche, whose works display a comparable narrative disruption. Kafka’s distinctive narrative strategies, Corngold points out, demand interpretation at the same time they resist it. Critics of Kafka, he says, must be aware that their approaches are guided by the principles that Kafka’s fiction identifies, dramatizes, and rejects.

A windfall for every reader: a trove of marvelous impossible-to-find Kafka stories in a masterful new translation by Michael Hofmann Selected by the preeminent Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner Stach and newly translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, the seventy-four pieces gathered here have been lost to sight for decades and two of them have never been translated into English before. Some stories are several pages long; some run about a page; a handful are only a few lines long: all are marvels. Even the most fragmentary texts are revelations. These pieces were drawn from two large volumes of the S. Fischer Verlag edition Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente (totaling some 1100 pages). “Franz Kafka is the master of the literary fragment,” as Stach comments in his afterword: "In no other European author does the proportion of completed and published works loom quite so...small in the overall mass of his papers, which consist largely of broken-off beginnings.” In fact, as Hofmann recently added: “‘Finished' seems to me, in the context of Kafka, a dubious or ironic condition, anyway. The more finished, the less finished. The less finished, the more finished. Gregor Samsa’s sister Grete getting up to stretch in the streetcar. What kind of an ending is that?! There’s perhaps some distinction to be made between ‘finished' and ‘ended.' Everything continues to vibrate or unsettle, anyway. Reiner Stach points out that none of the three novels were ‘completed.' Some pieces break off, or are concluded, or stop—it doesn’t matter!—after two hundred pages, some after two lines. The gusto, the friendliness, the wit with which Kafka launches himself into these things is astonishing.”

Part of the Legend Classics series It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves. A novel of such ambiguity will inevitably lend itself to a diversity of interpretation, but in The Trial you can at least be sure to find every element of storytelling now defined as Kafkaesque. Josef K., our protagonist, is unexpectedly arrested on the morning of his thirtieth birthday. The agents who arrest him are unidentified, the agency they work for is unspecified, and the crime for which he has been accused is unknown. When he is released, shortly after, he is told to await further instruction. So begins the manic and emotionless trial of a man beholden to the whims of an unknown force, and his painstaking attempts to find a way out of this existential maze. The Trial brings into focus the absurdity of life, our universal fear of judgement, and one ultimate question: how much of this endless maze will you explore before you accept the fate life has bestowed upon you? The Legend Classics series: Around the World in Eighty Days The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Importance of Being Earnest Alice's Adventures in Wonderland The Metamorphosis The Railway Children The Hound of the Baskervilles Frankenstein Wuthering Heights Three Men in a Boat The Time Machine Little Women Anne of Green Gables The Jungle Book The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories Dracula A Study in Scarlet Leaves of Grass The Secret Garden The War of the Worlds A Christmas Carol Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Heart of Darkness The Scarlet Letter This Side of Paradise Oliver Twist The Picture of Dorian Gray Treasure Island The Turn of the Screw The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Emma The Trial A Selection of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe Grimm Fairy Tales

The Myth of Power and the Self brings together Walter Sokel's most significant essays on Kafka written over a period of thirty-one years, 1966-1997. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) has come to be one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. The Myth of Power and the Self brings together Walter Sokel's most significant essays on Kafka written over a period of thirty-one years, 1966-1997. This volume begins with a discussion of Sokel's 1966 pamphlet on Kafka and a summary of his 1964 book, Tragik und Ironie (Tragedy and Irony), which has never been translated into English, and includes several essays published in English for the first time. Sokel places Kafka's writings in a very large cultural context by fusing Freudian and Expressionist perspectives and incorporating more theoretical approaches--linguistic theory, Gnosticism, and aspects of Derrida--into his synthesis. This superb collection of essays by one of the most qualified Kafka scholars today will bring new understanding to Kafka's work and will be of interest to literary critics, intellectual historians, and students and scholars of German literature and Kafka.

Franz Kafka, the author has very nicely narrated the story of Gregou Samsa who wakes up one day to discover that he has metamorphosed into a bug. The book concerns itself with the themes of alienation and existentialism. The author has written many important stories, including ‘The Judgement’, and much of his novels ‘Amerika’, ‘The Castle’, ‘The Hunger Artist’. Many of his stories were published during his lifetime but many were not. Over the course of the 1920s and 30s Kafka’s works were published and translated instantly becoming landmarks of twentieth-century literature. Ironically, the story ends on an optimistic note, as the family puts itself back together. The style of the book epitomizes Kafka’s writing. Kafka very interestingly, used to present an impossible situation, such as a man’s transformation into an insect, and develop the story from there with perfect realism and intense attention to detail. The Metamorphosis is an autobiographical piece of writing, and we find that parts of the story reflect Kafka’s own life.