Kafka's Zoopoetics

Kafka's Zoopoetics PDF Author: Naama Harel
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472126512
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nonhuman figures are ubiquitous in the work of Franz Kafka, from his early stories down to his very last one. Despite their prominence throughout his oeuvre, Kafka’s animal representations have been considered first and foremost as mere allegories of intrahuman matters. In recent years, the allegorization of Kafka’s animals has been poetically dismissed by Kafka’s commentators and politically rejected by posthumanist scholars. Such critique, however, has yet to inspire either an overarching or an interdiscursive account. This book aims to fill this lacuna. Positing animal stories as a distinct and significant corpus within Kafka’s entire poetics, and closely examining them in dialogue with both literary and posthumanist analysis, Kafka’s Zoopoetics critically revisits animality, interspecies relations, and the very human-animal contradistinction in the writings of Franz Kafka. Kafka’s animals typically stand at the threshold between humanity and animality, fusing together human and nonhuman features. Among his liminal creatures we find a human transformed into vermin (in “The Metamorphosis”), an ape turned into a human being (in “A Report to an Academy”), talking jackals (in “Jackals and Arabs”), a philosophical dog (in “Researches of a Dog”), a contemplative mole-like creature (in “The Burrow”), and indiscernible beings (in “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People”). Depicting species boundaries as mutable and obscure, Kafka creates a fluid human-animal space, which can be described as “humanimal.” The constitution of a humanimal space radically undermines the stark barrier between human and other animals, dictated by the anthropocentric paradigm. Through denying animalistic elements in humans, and disavowing the agency of nonhuman animals, excluding them from social life, and neutralizing compassion for them, this barrier has been designed to regularize both humanity and animality. The contextualization of Kafka's animals within posthumanist theory engenders a post-anthropocentric arena, which is simultaneously both imagined and very real.

Kafka's Zoopoetics

Kafka's Zoopoetics PDF Author: Naama Harel
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472126512
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nonhuman figures are ubiquitous in the work of Franz Kafka, from his early stories down to his very last one. Despite their prominence throughout his oeuvre, Kafka’s animal representations have been considered first and foremost as mere allegories of intrahuman matters. In recent years, the allegorization of Kafka’s animals has been poetically dismissed by Kafka’s commentators and politically rejected by posthumanist scholars. Such critique, however, has yet to inspire either an overarching or an interdiscursive account. This book aims to fill this lacuna. Positing animal stories as a distinct and significant corpus within Kafka’s entire poetics, and closely examining them in dialogue with both literary and posthumanist analysis, Kafka’s Zoopoetics critically revisits animality, interspecies relations, and the very human-animal contradistinction in the writings of Franz Kafka. Kafka’s animals typically stand at the threshold between humanity and animality, fusing together human and nonhuman features. Among his liminal creatures we find a human transformed into vermin (in “The Metamorphosis”), an ape turned into a human being (in “A Report to an Academy”), talking jackals (in “Jackals and Arabs”), a philosophical dog (in “Researches of a Dog”), a contemplative mole-like creature (in “The Burrow”), and indiscernible beings (in “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People”). Depicting species boundaries as mutable and obscure, Kafka creates a fluid human-animal space, which can be described as “humanimal.” The constitution of a humanimal space radically undermines the stark barrier between human and other animals, dictated by the anthropocentric paradigm. Through denying animalistic elements in humans, and disavowing the agency of nonhuman animals, excluding them from social life, and neutralizing compassion for them, this barrier has been designed to regularize both humanity and animality. The contextualization of Kafka's animals within posthumanist theory engenders a post-anthropocentric arena, which is simultaneously both imagined and very real.

Kafka: A Guide for the Perplexed

Kafka: A Guide for the Perplexed PDF Author: Clayton Koelb
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441171576
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
Franz Kafka is one of the most widely taught, and read, writers in world literature. Readers encountering texts like 'The Metamorphosis' and The Trial for the first time are frequently perplexed by his often intentionally weird writing. Some might say that Kafka's enduring achievement has been to make his readers love being perplexed. As much of Kafka's writing is designed to perplex the reader, this guide helps the reader understand why and how perplexity has been deliberately created by Kafka's text and to realize what the uses of such perplexity might be. The book guides readers through their first encounters with Kafka and introduces the problems involved in reading his texts, the nature of his texts from the key novels and novellas to letters and professional writings, his life as a writer and different approaches to reading Kafka.

Kafka's Jewish Languages

Kafka's Jewish Languages PDF Author: David Suchoff
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812205243
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
After Franz Kafka died in 1924, his novels and short stories were published in ways that downplayed both their author's roots in Prague and his engagement with Jewish tradition and language, so as to secure their place in the German literary canon. Now, nearly a century after Kafka began to create his fictions, Germany, Israel, and the Czech Republic lay claim to his legacy. Kafka's Jewish Languages brings Kafka's stature as a specifically Jewish writer into focus. David Suchoff explores the Yiddish and modern Hebrew that inspired Kafka's vision of tradition. Citing the Jewish sources crucial to the development of Kafka's style, the book demonstrates the intimate relationship between the author's Jewish modes of expression and the larger literary significance of his works. Suchoff shows how "The Judgment" evokes Yiddish as a language of comic curse and examines how Yiddish, African American, and culturally Zionist voices appear in the unfinished novel, Amerika. In his reading of The Trial, Suchoff highlights the black humor Kafka learned from the Yiddish theater, and he interprets The Castle in light of Kafka's involvement with the renewal of the Hebrew language. Finally, he uncovers the Yiddish and Hebrew meanings behind Kafka's "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-Folk" and considers the recent legal case in Tel Aviv over the possession of Kafka's missing manuscripts as a parable of the transnational meanings of his writing.

Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed

Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed PDF Author: Steven Earnshaw
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441194991
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
Existentialism is often studied by students with little or no background in philosophy; either as an introduction to the idea of studying philosophy or as part of a literary course. Although it is often an attractive topic for students interested in thinking about questions of 'self' or 'being', it also requires them to study difficult thinkers and texts. This Guide for the Perplexed begins with the question of 'What is Existentialism?' and then moves on to provide a brief analysis of the key thinkers, writers and texts - both philosophical and literary - central to existentialism. Chapters focus particularly on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus but also discuss other philosophers and writers such as Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Kafka. The second section of the Guide introduces key topics associated with existentialist thought; Self, Consciousness, the question of God and Commitment. Each chapter explains the concepts and debates and provides guidance on reading and analysing the philosophical and literary texts addressed, focusing throughout on clarifying the areas students find most difficult

Kafka's Ethics of Interpretation

Kafka's Ethics of Interpretation PDF Author: Jennifer L. Geddes
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810132915
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Get Book Here

Book Description
Kafka's Ethics of Interpretation refutes the oft-repeated claim, made by Kafka's greatest interpreters, including Walter Benjamin and Harold Bloom, that Kafka sought to evade interpretation of his writings. Jennifer L. Geddes shows that this claim about Kafka's deliberate uninterpretability is not only wrong, it also misconstrues a central concern of his work. Kafka was not trying to avoid or prevent interpretation; rather, his works are centrally concerned with it. Geddes explores the interpretation that takes place within, and in response to, Kafka's writings, and pairs Kafka's works with readings of Sigmund Freud, Pierre Bourdieu, Tzvetan Todorov, Emmanuel Levinas, and others. She argues that Kafka explores interpretation as a mode of power and violence, but also as a mode of engagement with the world and others. Kafka, she argues, challenges us to rethink the ways we read texts, engage others, and navigate the world through our interpretations of them.

Heidegger and Music

Heidegger and Music PDF Author: Casey Rentmeester
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538154145
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although philosophers have examined and commented on music for centuries, Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, had frustratingly little to say about music—directly, at least. This volume, the first to tackle Heidegger and music, features contributions from philosophers, musicians, educators, and musicologists from many countries throughout the world, aims to utilize Heidegger’s philosophy to shed light on the place of music in different contexts and fields of practice. Heidegger’s thought is applied to a wide range of musical spheres, including improvisation, classical music, electronic music, African music, ancient Chinese music, jazz, rock n’ roll, composition, and musical performance. The volume also features a wide range of philosophical insights on the essence of music, music’s place in society, and the promise of music’s ability to open up new ways of understanding the world with the onset of the technological and digital musical age. Heidegger and Music breaks new philosophical ground by showcasing creative vignettes that not only push Heidegger’s concepts in new directions, but also get us to question the meaning of music in various contexts.

Kafka's Contextuality

Kafka's Contextuality PDF Author: Alan Udoff
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Get Book Here

Book Description


Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return

Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return PDF Author: Antonio Sanna
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030047989
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book Here

Book Description
This edited collection offers an interdisciplinary study of Twin Peaks: The Return, the third season of a TV program that has attracted the attention (and appreciation) of spectators, fans, and critics for over two decades. The book takes readers into several distinct areas and addresses the different approaches and the range of topics invited by the multidimensionality of the subject itself: the philosophical, the artistic, the socio-cultural, and the personal. The eighteen chapters constituting the volume are academic in their approach to the subject and in their methodology, whether they apply a historical, psychoanalytical, film studies, or gender studies perspective to the text under examination. The variety and range of perspectives in these aforementioned chapters reflect the belief that a study of the full complexity of Twin Peaks: The Return, as well as a timely assessment of the critical importance of the program, requires both an interdisciplinary perspective and the fusion of different intellectual approaches across genres. The chapters demonstrate a collective awareness of the TV series as a fundamental milestone in contemporary culture.

Filipinas Everywhere

Filipinas Everywhere PDF Author: E. San Juan Jr.
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1782844066
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this epoch of disastrous neoliberal globalisation, E. San Juan's critique seizes the crisis in neo-colonial Philippines as a point of intervention. As current Philippine President Duterte's timely war on drugs and corruption rages, San Juan foregrounds the facticity that Filipinos are once more confronted with the barbaric legacy of U.S. domination, legitimised today as civilising humanitarianism. This wide-ranging discourse by a Filipino radical scholar interrogates the apologetic use of postcolonial dogmas, Saussurean semiology versus Peircean semiotics, Kafka's allegory on torture, Edward Said's use of Gramsci, and the post-conceptual view of photography. The author also diagnoses the symptoms of nihilistic neoliberal ideology found in media discourses on diaspora, terrorism, and globalisation. His critique of academic postcolonial studies sums up the arguments elaborated in his previous books, Beyond Postcolonial Theory (St Martins Press), After Post-Colonialism (Rowman & Littlefield), and especially US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave Macmillan). Overall, San Juan seeks to deploy a historical-materialist perspective in elucidating the dialectical interplay of contradictory forces symbolised in art and diverse cultural texts. In the process, he delineates the contexts of events and encounters generating revolutionary transformations in this transitional Asian-Pacific islands that, with its subjugation in the Filipino-American War of 1899-1913, marked the fateful advent of U.S. imperial hegemony on the planet.

Kafka's Last Pipes

Kafka's Last Pipes PDF Author: John P. Anderson
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 1627340823
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Get Book Here

Book Description
Fresh from the twilight zone of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, this non-academic author treats on a line by line basis two of Kafka's last stories, stories written while he was wheezing with tuberculosis. Not surprisingly, these stories features pipes, just what Kafka was thinking about all the time while he was bed ridden, his sore pipes. Kafka experienced the threat of death at the same time as he experienced the love of his life with Dora Diamant. In these two stories Kafka spot-lights fear and love, the most basic human issues and those that had taken possession of Kafka's life. Fear and love in the lives of a mole-like creature alone in a burrow and mice in a crowded colony. In stories with no humans, Kafka teaches us what is most important in being human. The Burrow examines fear-based isolation of a mole-like creature living all alone in his underground burrow. The only connection with others is fear-based taking, taking by claws and teeth. You are either the diner or dinner, never a guest or host. You are alone but not independent because fear eats your life possibilities independence could give. You are your own worst enemy. Josephine the Singer features love-based giving through art, Kafka's last word on the purpose of art. Like a loving parent giving to her child, the artist mouse Josephine attempts to inspire independent individuality in other mice in the colony through the example of her unique and spontaneous singing. This she gives free of charge. Because of fear of survival stoked by the colony leadership, the rest of the mouse collective hears her singing as a mouse but not as an individual. They remain in fear-based group think with reduced life possibilities. In both stories, the issue is the effect of fear or love on independent individual identity and life possibilities. For Kafka, this was the uber human issue as he prepared to meet his maker.