How to Research Like a Dog—Book Presentation

Germanic Review, 2024

Franz Kafka, intrigued by the possibility of representing movement in a still medium, made several drawings of galloping horses. This essay examines these drawings in the context of contemporaneous attempts to capture dynamic motion in visual media. Around 1900, artists and scientists experimented with various painting styles and photographic techniques to depict the movement of human and animal bodies in highbrow art, popular entertainment, and to advance the science of sport. Kafka's short literary work "Wunsch, Indianer zu werden" represents a related attempt to depict the movement of a horse and rider. This essay draws a parallel between the destabilizing effects of Kafka's visual and literary representations of a horse in motion, which reveal the productive tensions that arise from representing movement in each medium.

Kafka in Context, ed. Carolin Duttlinger, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 35-43, 2017

Kafka’s professional occupation offers us key insights into defining features of his literary work. In his stories and novels, the biographies of his characters are informed by a poetics of accident, communication is entangled in a poetics of translation, while his diegetic worlds emerge from a poetics of networks where time, space, and social status are uncertain and subject to changes depending on hybrid agencies that are in turn unclear or hidden. All of these features resonate densely with Kafka’s work profile as a legal officer in the govern¬mental industrial accident insurance of Bohemia. My article unfolds this work profile against the poetic horizon sketched above. It opens with an overview over Kafka’s professional career, the history of the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute of Bohemia, and the multilingual and proto-federalist constitution of the Empire and its Crownlands. I will then zoom into his key areas of expertise and responsi¬bility. First, the agenda of accident prevention and accident compensation: here Kafka not only studied the ergonomic details and dangers of man-machine interaction in a sweepingly mechanizing work environment, but also witnessed the bureaucratic procedures of transcription and the legal disputes for compensation triggered by the event of an accident. Second, the agenda of risk classification of industrial firms, and the handling of claims for revision submitted by insured company owners: the twofold codification of industrial accidents – as a specific individual event or case, and as a statistical figure related to whole industries and modes of production – offers a key to understanding more closely Kafka’s diegetic worlds and their inhabitants who frequently are oscillating between flesh and blood individuals and sets of statistical or bureaucratic data. And last but not least the agenda of social political propaganda: as the writer of major official or public statements of his Institute’s agenda, Kafka developed an intricate skill to connect the voices of the social political field in order to support the historically new agent of social insurance. All these agendae can be connected to one or more of the poetic features named above. However, it will be even more important here to stretch the concept of context to its very limit by arguing that Kafka’s office writings and his literature tend to challenge the very distinction between text and context. In many instances, they appear as two stages of one and the same writing project. By using the power of polyphonic language, Kafka the writer completes the work of Kafka the insurance clerk. He reconciles what cannot be reconciled – transcribed to calculable risk – by the power of industrial and social statistics: the dangers of ethnic conflict (race struggle) that escapes the logic of class struggle and therefore not only challenged the establishment of social insurance, but the very existence of the Habsburg Empire.

1986

2017

This paper applies analytical philosophical and rhetorical linguistic, or tropological, methods to Kafka's two main novels, The Castle and The Trial. The main tropes discussed and applied are metaphor, metonymy, and ambiguity in addition to some references to irony. The main background presupposition is that Kafka's text does not allow for consensual interpretation. Any reader may read the text as he or she likes. Instead of trying to formulate my own interpretation I adopt a tropological method. I try to show how especially ambiguity structures the text and guides the movement of its material content to form new images and meanings. This is not so much a new interpretation of Kafka's novels but a methodologically guided attempt to show how they can be studied without a commitment to a given interpretation.

2014

Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 2006

SVĚT ITERATURY, 2024

Against the background of the 100 th anniversary of Franz Kafka's death, the article explores a branch of author-as-character fiction that escapes the generic restraints of biography and biofiction: unchained writer fiction. Using Steven Soderbergh's film Kafka (1991), filmmaker Gil Kofman's novel debut aKa (2023), and Haruki Murakami's global bestseller Kafka on the Shore (2002/2005) as a provisional sample, different modes of unchaining Kafka from the fetters of biography and biofiction are brought to light and contrasted against each other.