Kafka for the Twenty-First Century

289 Pages·2011·10.547 MB·English

by  Stanley Corngold, Ruth V. Gross

Kafka for the Twenty-First Century
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Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture
Kafka for the
Twenty-First Century
Edited by
Stanley Corngold and Ruth V. Gross
Copyright © 2011 by the Editors and Contributors
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation,
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2011
by Camden House
Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
www.camden-house.com
and of Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-482-0
ISBN-10: 1-57113-482-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kafka for the twenty-first century / edited by Stanley Corngold and
Ruth V. Gross.
p. cm. — (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-482-0 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
ISBN-10: 1-57113-482-4 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
1. Kafka, Franz, 1883–1924—Criticism and interpretation. I. Corngold,
Stanley. II. Gross, Ruth V. III. Title. IV. Series.
PT2621.A26Z75846 2011
833’.912 — dc22
2011008049
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
Contents
Preface vii
List of Abbreviations for Kafka Citations xi
Introduction 1
Stanley Corngold and Ruth V. Gross
1: Running Texts, Stunning Drafts 24
Roland Reuß
2: “Torturing the Gordian Knot”: Kafka and Metaphor 48
Mark Harman
3: Nietzsche and Kafka: The Dionysian Connection 64
Walter H. Sokel
4: What Kafka Learned from Flaubert: “Absent-Minded
Window-Gazing” and “The Judgment” 75
Uta Degner
5: Kafka’s Racial Melancholy 89
Katja Garloff
6: Strange Loops and the Absent Center in The Castle 105
Jacob Burnett
7: Proxies in Kafka: Koncipist FK and Prokurist Josef K. 120
Doreen Densky
8: Kafka, Goffman, and the Total Institution 136
Ritchie Robertson
9: Kafka in Virilio’s Teletopical City 151
Rolf J. Goebel
10: Kafka’s Visual Method: The Gaze, the Cinematic, and
the Intermedial 165
Peter Beicken
11: “Samsa war Reisender”: Trains, Trauma, and the Unreadable
Body 179
John Zilcosky
(cid:2)
vi CONTENTS
12: The Comfort of Strangeness: Correlating the Kafkaesque
and the Kafkan in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled 207
Robert Lemon
13: Kafka’s Journey into the Future: Crossing Borders into
Israeli/Palestinian Worlds 222
Iris Bruce
14: Kafka and Italy: A New Perspective on the Italian Literary
Landscape 237
Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski
Bibliography 251
Notes on the Contributors 273
Preface
TO JUDGE BY THE AMOUNT OF KAFKA SCHOLARSHIP that has appeared
in the last few years, it is safe to say that Franz Kafka is alive and well
in the twenty-first century. This fact should not surprise us, since we
know that Kafka was the most widely read German author in the last half
of the previous century and that there has hardly been a period since the
Second World War in which Kafka scholarship has not thrived. But with
all the extant criticism and interest in this author whose published works
are a nano-fraction of the material that has been published about them,
there is, of course, always also a danger. From the beginning, Kafka was
the new, the different, the true representative of modernity. We have read
his works through religious, existentialist, structuralist, and more
recently, postmodern perspectives. The “period of slackening” that Jean
François Lyotard described decades ago as the beginning of a certain
version of postmodernism entails an “end to experimentation,” and in
our discourse of literature this lull suggests the possibility of what one
might call “Kafka exhaustion.” Can there be a permanent avatar of the
avant-garde? How does the indisputable status of a classic accord with
the indisputable role of a disruptor, an instigator of the new? The para-
doxes of Kafka’s position in world culture lead to the same question —
“Kafka, again?” The answer, of course, has always been, and continues to
be, “Yes, Kafka, again.”
Why these thoughts now? Although it could be argued that turns-of-
century are artificial markers, we tend to give them considerable attention
and look to them as signposts of cultural change. In this spirit a conference
with the subject “Kafka at 125” — a celebration of Kafka’s 125th birthday
— was held in the Research Triangle of North Carolina in April 2009.
Clayton Koelb, James Rolleston, and Ruth V. Gross, the organizers of the
conference, each a member of one of the three research universities in the
Triangle and each a veteran Kafka scholar, felt that the concerns of a new
century called for a fresh look not only at what Kafka meant to the preced-
ing century but also at what challenges his works might offer to the dec-
ades ahead. Their idea was to assemble a number of distinguished Kafka
researchers from North America and Europe to examine together the ways
in which this extraordinary writer, who so decisively shaped our concep-
tion of the twentieth century, might suggest fruitful strategies for coping
with the twenty-first.
(cid:2)
viii PREFACE
From its inception, this conference was to be different: the intention
was to create a model that would allow participants to engage in lengthy
round-table discussions around certain topics and thereby connect to and
expand upon the current critical discourses concerning and surrounding
Kafka. No papers, other than the keynotes, were read: the conference was
all discussion. Individual papers and abstracts were posted to a website
before the conference and therefore needed only brief summaries before
commentary at the actual conference could begin. What ensued was a
productive synergy arising from the conversations that took place. To be
sure, the presentations enhanced the Kafkan critical base, but there was
also a healthy expression of differing views and insights that allowed par-
ticipants opportunities to refine and rethink arguments in keeping with the
challenges posed by their colleagues.
We asked a number of broad questions in our initial call for papers
— What have we learned about the context surrounding Kafka’s literary
production, and what more can we hope to learn? How does understand-
ing that context affect how we read his stories? What are the consequences
of new critical editions that offer the general reader unprecedented access
to Kafka’s works in their original manuscript form? How does our view of
Kafka change in response to changes in the priorities and fashions of liter-
ary scholarship? What are the elements in Kafka’s fiction that are likely to
find resonance in the altered historical context of a new millennium? How
do we compose a complete and coherent account of a personality with so
many often contradictory aspects: the writer, the Bohemian Jew, the bach-
elor son, the would-be celibate, the lover of many women, the lawyer, the
frustrated bureaucrat, the successful business executive, the German, the
Austrian, the Czech, and the failed novelist who is perhaps the most influ-
ential novelist of the twentieth century? The response to our call for papers
was enthusiastic; presenters were then selected from the many abstracts
proposed. In the proposals we immediately saw a number of intriguing
answers that, in true Kafkan fashion, generated further questions. At the
same time we invited four keynoters to begin each of the four half-day
discussion sessions: Roland Reuß from Germany, Walter Sokel from the
United States, Ritchie Robertson from the United Kingdom, and John
Zilcosky from Canada. Representing not only four different international
regions but four very different approaches to Kafka in the twenty-first
century, their essays are included in the present collection.
The variation in their methodologies was only one of the ways in
which the conference bridged divides and provided new syntheses of
thought. From emeritus professors to graduate students and all academic
levels in between, the conference participants, building on the rich body
of Kafka criticism of the past decades, presented new connections and pos-
sibilities of reading the Kafkan oeuvre that — appropriate to the occasion
— often made familiar texts unfamiliar again. The “Kafka world” in the
(cid:2)
PREFACE ix
academic sense has been a remarkably open and welcoming discourse. And
so it continues to be. Those of us who turned to Kafka or began with him
many years ago recall and will always be grateful for this community and
its support. A nonagenarian and a graduate student can speak to the prob-
lems of Kafka and learn from each other, which is an unusual thing and, to
many of us, characteristic of Kafka studies. We asked conference partici-
pants to expand their papers for possible publication and finally selected
approximately one half for inclusion here. Contributors were able to take
arguments from other papers in the volume into account in writing theirs
through a website that was established for this purpose. In this way we
hope to have maintained the “dialogical” texture so vividly present at the
conference. In other words, our intention was to produce a volume pre-
serving the collegial, interactive spirit of our celebration of Kafka.
Without help from the DAAD, North Carolina State University, Duke
University, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the confer-
ence and subsequently this volume, could not have happened, and the
editors would like to thank those institutions for their generous support.
Meanwhile, the great question remains: “How can Kafka be so unique
as to escape the logic of human attention and the fickleness of academic
fashion, as he continues to draw us toward the future and the new?” The
answer to this question can be found nowhere else than in the ongoing
Kafka discourse. Only one decade into the twenty-first century, it is, of
course, too soon to know for sure but certainly not too soon to predict
that — for reasons that should be clear from the essays in this volume —
Kafka will remain, as he was in the twentieth, its most widely read German
author.
Ruth V. Gross, Raleigh, NC