Franz Kafka (Writing in Motion) .pdf

Es gibt ein Ziel, aber keinen Weg; Was wir Weg nennen, ist Zögern.

E|C, 2024

In this paper, I will contend that Franz Kafka's use of language primarily follows a choral model. This stylistic choice matters in the context of Kafkian struggle to accomplish the purest expression of being in written form: since Kafka believes that language is bound to produce a false and unsuccessful representation of reality if it rests on defined grammatical uses, he borrows from choral dance a compositional model in order to implement an anti-grammatical fashion to write in, as the only option to make language enact truth. I will claim that a theoretical reconstruction of this model, and a discussion of the semiotic counterparts of its elements, also matters in the context of translation of Kafka's work. Translating Kafka properly would thus mean to convey the salient traits of his use of German to cope with the choral model, i.e. prosody, figural clusters, and harmony, and the overall tone of sublimity and comedy. Then, it would result in a prudent exercise of the target language, with special attention to its intersemiotic trasmutative relationship to choral gestures.

Journal of Austrian Studies, 2013

2011

The editors and contributors owe their collaboration on this volume to the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) in Oslo, Norway. Two of the editors-Jakob Lothe and Beatrice Sandberg-were members of the Narrative Theory and Analysis research project, which was proposed and led by Jakob and hosted and funded by CAS during the 2005-2006 academic year. CAS supported not just the project but also a symposium on Franz Kafka in May 2006 that served as the genesis of this book. We owe a profound debt to Professor Willy Østreng, who was director of the Centre at the time we were there, and the administrative staff of CAS, for their friendliness, encouragement, and assistance. Additionally, CAS generously contributed funding to offset the publication costs of this volume. We have also benefited from the collegial intellectual atmosphere fostered at CAS by the other members of the research team: Daphna erdinast-Vulcan, Anniken greve, Jeremy hawthorn, J. hillis Miller, James Phelan, Anette h. Storeide, Susan R. Suleiman, and Anne Thelle. Finally, two of the editors wish to give special thanks to the third-Ronald Speirs-for his invaluable input, not only generally but also with particular regard to his contribution to the writing of the introduction.

Kafka und die kleine Prosa der Moderne / Kafka and Short Modernist Prose. Ed. by Manfred Engel and Ritchie Robertson (Oxford Kafka Studies; 1), 2011

Short prose was the form Kafka favoured for many of his most important works. It was also the medium of much innovatory Modernist writing in the period 1900-33. The essays in this volume investigate Kafka’s short prose in relation to that written by his contemporaries (including Nietzsche, Robert Walser, Döblin, Benn, Musil, Broch), thus helping to locate Kafka more precisely within the literary context of his time.

MATERIALI DI ESTETICA. TERZA SERIE N. 4.2 2017, 2017

This is the first translation of Brod’s text which was originally published on the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” on 22.10.1965. This edition, compared with the one in “The Prague Circle” (1966), also presents a new translation of Kafka’s only known aesthetical fragment of 1906 upon the experience of beauty and novelty, two elements which play a salient role in the whole of his narrative. Brod’s suggestions as well as Kafka’s counterarguments encompass the process of knowledge thus developing peculiar points of view upon subjectivity and creative processes. German-Jewish Cultural Studies and Philosophy; German Literature; Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism; Intermediality and Intertextuality are here to be reckoned with KEY-WORDS Franz Kafka – Max Brod – Aesthetical Pleasure – Beauty – Novelty - Narratives – “psicologico” instead of “physiologisch” – Representational Processes - Body as Involved in Writing Strategies Aesthetics – Fiction – Creative Processes – Beauty – Novelty – Arguments vs Counterarguments; Intermediality; Intertextuality; Max Brod – Franz Kafka

to the memory of charles bernheimer abstract Franz Kafka's celebrated epistolary 'love' relationship with Milena Jesenská was influenced by a late-nineteenth-century techno-bureaucratic development: the separation of travelling bodies from travelling letters -or, in official Austrian jargon, of 'Personenbeförderung' from 'Nachrichtenübermittlung'. My 'psycho-technological' reading of Briefe an Milena turns our attention away from the writer's familiar private dilemmas (fears of intimacy, neurasthenia, narcissism) and toward the discursive, technocratic constellations that shaped long-distance eroticism in the early twentieth century. Shot through with remarks about railway strikes, timetables, telegrams, and stamps, Briefe an Milena demonstrates how fin-de-siècle technologies of intercourse helped to determine one writer's emotional attachments and detachments. More specifically, Kafka's writings document how he employed a disembodied network of letters, telegrams and stamps ('Briefverkehr') in order to contain what he (along with the contemporary psychoanalysts, Freud and Abraham) viewed as a dangerously sexualised, feminised rail system ('Eisenbahnverkehr'). Briefe an Milena thus documents the tension between technologies of absence and presence in the construction of modern love. Central to my discussion is a lengthy, oddly passionate stamp-exchange between Kafka and Milena that has been totally ignored by Kafka scholars. The emotional character of this exchange hints at the lovers' attempt to bridge the technological gap between presence and absence that at once sustains and undermines their affection.

2021

Kafka's 'Before the Law' showcases his modernist approach to literature that marks a break from literary Realism. Through analysing the text, the essay would aim at exploring Kafka's rebellion against Realism with regard to the content and form he devises, and his peculiar relationship with language.

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.