Author: Allen Thiher
Publisher: Understanding Modern European
ISBN: 9781611178289
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
"This volume begins with a biographical introduction and follows with chapters devoted to works published by Kafka, unpublished works, and the major novels Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle."--Publisher information.
Understanding Franz Kafka
Author: Allen Thiher
Publisher: Understanding Modern European
ISBN: 9781611178289
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
"This volume begins with a biographical introduction and follows with chapters devoted to works published by Kafka, unpublished works, and the major novels Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle."--Publisher information.
Publisher: Understanding Modern European
ISBN: 9781611178289
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
"This volume begins with a biographical introduction and follows with chapters devoted to works published by Kafka, unpublished works, and the major novels Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle."--Publisher information.
He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka
Author: Franz Kafka
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 0374722293
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
A new selection of Franz Kafka’s shorter fiction and nonfiction work, selected and with a preface by Book of Numbers author Joshua Cohen. “Being asked to write about Kafka is like being asked to describe the Great Wall of China by someone who’s standing just next to it. The only honest thing to do is point.” —Joshua Cohen, from his foreword to He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka This is a Kafka emergency kit, a congregation of the brief, the minor works that are actually major. Joshua Cohen has produced a frame that refuses distinctions between what is a story, a letter, a workplace memo, and a diary entry, also including popular favorites like The Bucket Rider, The Penal Colony, and The Burrow. Here we see Kafka’s preoccupations in writing about animals, messiah variations, food, and exercise, each in his signature style. Cohen’s selection emphasizes the stately structure of utterly coherent logic within an utterly incoherent and illogical world, showing how Kafka harnessed the humblest grammar to metamorphic power, until the predominant effect ceases to be the presence of an unreliable narrator but the absence of the universe’s only reliable narrator—God.
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 0374722293
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
A new selection of Franz Kafka’s shorter fiction and nonfiction work, selected and with a preface by Book of Numbers author Joshua Cohen. “Being asked to write about Kafka is like being asked to describe the Great Wall of China by someone who’s standing just next to it. The only honest thing to do is point.” —Joshua Cohen, from his foreword to He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka This is a Kafka emergency kit, a congregation of the brief, the minor works that are actually major. Joshua Cohen has produced a frame that refuses distinctions between what is a story, a letter, a workplace memo, and a diary entry, also including popular favorites like The Bucket Rider, The Penal Colony, and The Burrow. Here we see Kafka’s preoccupations in writing about animals, messiah variations, food, and exercise, each in his signature style. Cohen’s selection emphasizes the stately structure of utterly coherent logic within an utterly incoherent and illogical world, showing how Kafka harnessed the humblest grammar to metamorphic power, until the predominant effect ceases to be the presence of an unreliable narrator but the absence of the universe’s only reliable narrator—God.
Understanding Franz Kafka
Author: Allen Thiher
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611178290
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314
Book Description
An analysis of the life of the eccentric author of The Trial, and his quest for meaning in his work. Franz Kafka is without question one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century despite the fact that much of his work remained unpublished when he died at a relatively young age in 1924. Kafka’s eccentric methods of composition and his diffident attitude toward publishing left most of his writing to be edited and published after his death by his literary executor, Max Brod. In Understanding Franz Kafka, Allen Thiher addresses the development of Kafka’s work by analyzing it in terms of its chronological unfolding, emphasizing the various phases in Kafka’s life that can be discerned in his constant quest to find a meaning for his writing. Thiher also shows that Kafka’s work, frequently self-referential, explores the ways literature can have meaning in a world in which writing is a dubious activity. After outlining Kafka’s life using new biographical information, Thiher examines Kafka’s first attempts at writing, often involving nearly farcical experiments. The study then shows how Kafka’s work developed through twists and turns, beginning with the breakthrough stories “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis,” continuing with his first attempt at a novel with Amerika, and followed by Kafka’s shifting back and forth between short fiction and two other unpublished novels, The Trial and The Castle. Thiher also calls on Kafka’s notebooks and diaries to help demonstrate that he never stopped experimenting in his attempt to find a literary form that might satisfy his desire to create some kind of transcendental text in an era in which the transcendent is at best an object of nostalgia or of comic derision. In short, Thiher contends, Kafka constantly sought the grounds for writing in a world in which all appears groundless.
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611178290
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314
Book Description
An analysis of the life of the eccentric author of The Trial, and his quest for meaning in his work. Franz Kafka is without question one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century despite the fact that much of his work remained unpublished when he died at a relatively young age in 1924. Kafka’s eccentric methods of composition and his diffident attitude toward publishing left most of his writing to be edited and published after his death by his literary executor, Max Brod. In Understanding Franz Kafka, Allen Thiher addresses the development of Kafka’s work by analyzing it in terms of its chronological unfolding, emphasizing the various phases in Kafka’s life that can be discerned in his constant quest to find a meaning for his writing. Thiher also shows that Kafka’s work, frequently self-referential, explores the ways literature can have meaning in a world in which writing is a dubious activity. After outlining Kafka’s life using new biographical information, Thiher examines Kafka’s first attempts at writing, often involving nearly farcical experiments. The study then shows how Kafka’s work developed through twists and turns, beginning with the breakthrough stories “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis,” continuing with his first attempt at a novel with Amerika, and followed by Kafka’s shifting back and forth between short fiction and two other unpublished novels, The Trial and The Castle. Thiher also calls on Kafka’s notebooks and diaries to help demonstrate that he never stopped experimenting in his attempt to find a literary form that might satisfy his desire to create some kind of transcendental text in an era in which the transcendent is at best an object of nostalgia or of comic derision. In short, Thiher contends, Kafka constantly sought the grounds for writing in a world in which all appears groundless.
Franz Kafka
Author: Stanley Corngold
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501722824
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 358
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501722824
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 358
Book Description
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.
Understanding Marcel Proust
Author: Allen Thiher
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 161117256X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311
Book Description
Understanding Marcel Proust includes an overview of Marcel Proust's development as a writer, addressing both works published and unpublished in his lifetime, and then offers an in-depth interpretation of Proust's major novel, In Search of Lost Time, relating it to the Western literary tradition while also demonstrating its radical newness as a narrative. In his introduction Allen Thiher outlines Proust's development in the context of the political and artistic life of the Third Republic, arguing that everything Proust wrote before In Search of Lost Time was an experiment in sorting out whether he wanted to be a writer of critical theory or of fiction. Ultimately, Thiher observes, all these experiments had a role in the elaboration of the novel. Proust became both theorist and fiction writer by creating a bildungsroman narrating a writer's education. What is perhaps most original about Thiher's interpretation, however, is his demonstration that Proust removed his aged narrator from the novel's temporal flow to achieve a kind of fictional transcendence. Proust never situates his narrator in historical time, which allows him to demonstrate concretely what he sees as the function of art: the truth of the absolute particular removed from time's determinations. The artist that the narrator hopes to become at the end of the novel must pursue his own individual truths—those in fact that the novel has narrated, for him and the reader, up to the novel's conclusion. Written in a language accessible to upper-level undergraduates as well as literate general readers, Understanding Marcel Proust simultaneously addresses a scholarly public aware of the critical arguments that Proust's work has generated. Thiher's study should make Proust's In Search of Lost Time more widely accessible by explicating its structure and themes.
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 161117256X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311
Book Description
Understanding Marcel Proust includes an overview of Marcel Proust's development as a writer, addressing both works published and unpublished in his lifetime, and then offers an in-depth interpretation of Proust's major novel, In Search of Lost Time, relating it to the Western literary tradition while also demonstrating its radical newness as a narrative. In his introduction Allen Thiher outlines Proust's development in the context of the political and artistic life of the Third Republic, arguing that everything Proust wrote before In Search of Lost Time was an experiment in sorting out whether he wanted to be a writer of critical theory or of fiction. Ultimately, Thiher observes, all these experiments had a role in the elaboration of the novel. Proust became both theorist and fiction writer by creating a bildungsroman narrating a writer's education. What is perhaps most original about Thiher's interpretation, however, is his demonstration that Proust removed his aged narrator from the novel's temporal flow to achieve a kind of fictional transcendence. Proust never situates his narrator in historical time, which allows him to demonstrate concretely what he sees as the function of art: the truth of the absolute particular removed from time's determinations. The artist that the narrator hopes to become at the end of the novel must pursue his own individual truths—those in fact that the novel has narrated, for him and the reader, up to the novel's conclusion. Written in a language accessible to upper-level undergraduates as well as literate general readers, Understanding Marcel Proust simultaneously addresses a scholarly public aware of the critical arguments that Proust's work has generated. Thiher's study should make Proust's In Search of Lost Time more widely accessible by explicating its structure and themes.
Metamorphosis and The Trial (Collins Classics)
Author: Franz Kafka
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0008110573
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 303
Book Description
HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0008110573
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 303
Book Description
HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.
Metamorphosis
Author: Franz Kafka
Publisher: Saptarshee Prakashan
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 80
Book Description
Publisher: Saptarshee Prakashan
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 80
Book Description
Franz Kafka
Author: Saul Friedlander
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030019515X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 211
Book Description
DIV Franz Kafka was the poet of his own disorder. Throughout his life he struggled with a pervasive sense of shame and guilt that left traces in his daily existence—in his many letters, in his extensive diaries, and especially in his fiction. This stimulating book investigates some of the sources of Kafka’s personal anguish and its complex reflections in his imaginary world. In his query, Saul Friedländer probes major aspects of Kafka’s life (family, Judaism, love and sex, writing, illness, and despair) that until now have been skewed by posthumous censorship. Contrary to Kafka’s dying request that all his papers be burned, Max Brod, Kafka’s closest friend and literary executor, edited and published the author’s novels and other works soon after his death in 1924. Friedländer shows that, when reinserted in Kafka’s letters and diaries, deleted segments lift the mask of “sainthood� frequently attached to the writer and thus restore previously hidden aspects of his individuality. /div
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030019515X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 211
Book Description
DIV Franz Kafka was the poet of his own disorder. Throughout his life he struggled with a pervasive sense of shame and guilt that left traces in his daily existence—in his many letters, in his extensive diaries, and especially in his fiction. This stimulating book investigates some of the sources of Kafka’s personal anguish and its complex reflections in his imaginary world. In his query, Saul Friedländer probes major aspects of Kafka’s life (family, Judaism, love and sex, writing, illness, and despair) that until now have been skewed by posthumous censorship. Contrary to Kafka’s dying request that all his papers be burned, Max Brod, Kafka’s closest friend and literary executor, edited and published the author’s novels and other works soon after his death in 1924. Friedländer shows that, when reinserted in Kafka’s letters and diaries, deleted segments lift the mask of “sainthood� frequently attached to the writer and thus restore previously hidden aspects of his individuality. /div
Kafka
Author: Reiner Stach
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069116584X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 728
Book Description
Telling the story of Kafka's final years as never before—the third volume in the acclaimed definitive biography This volume of Reiner Stach's acclaimed and definitive biography of Franz Kafka tells the story of the final years of the writer's life, from 1916 to 1924—a period during which the world Kafka had known came to an end. Stach's riveting narrative, which reflects the latest findings about Kafka's life and works, draws readers in with nearly cinematic precision, zooming in for extreme close-ups of Kafka's personal life, then pulling back for panoramic shots of a wider world blighted by World War I, disease, and inflation. In these years, Kafka was spared military service at the front, yet his work as a civil servant brought him into chilling proximity with its grim realities. He was witness to unspeakable misery, lost the financial security he had been counting on to lead the life of a writer, and remained captive for years in his hometown of Prague. The outbreak of tuberculosis and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire constituted a double shock for Kafka, and made him agonizingly aware of his increasing rootlessness. He began to pose broader existential questions, and his writing grew terser and more reflective, from the parable-like Country Doctor stories and A Hunger Artist to The Castle. A door seemed to open in the form of a passionate relationship with the Czech journalist Milena Jesenská. But the romance was unfulfilled and Kafka, an incurably ill German Jew with a Czech passport, continued to suffer. However, his predicament only sharpened his perceptiveness, and the final period of his life became the years of insight.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069116584X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 728
Book Description
Telling the story of Kafka's final years as never before—the third volume in the acclaimed definitive biography This volume of Reiner Stach's acclaimed and definitive biography of Franz Kafka tells the story of the final years of the writer's life, from 1916 to 1924—a period during which the world Kafka had known came to an end. Stach's riveting narrative, which reflects the latest findings about Kafka's life and works, draws readers in with nearly cinematic precision, zooming in for extreme close-ups of Kafka's personal life, then pulling back for panoramic shots of a wider world blighted by World War I, disease, and inflation. In these years, Kafka was spared military service at the front, yet his work as a civil servant brought him into chilling proximity with its grim realities. He was witness to unspeakable misery, lost the financial security he had been counting on to lead the life of a writer, and remained captive for years in his hometown of Prague. The outbreak of tuberculosis and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire constituted a double shock for Kafka, and made him agonizingly aware of his increasing rootlessness. He began to pose broader existential questions, and his writing grew terser and more reflective, from the parable-like Country Doctor stories and A Hunger Artist to The Castle. A door seemed to open in the form of a passionate relationship with the Czech journalist Milena Jesenská. But the romance was unfulfilled and Kafka, an incurably ill German Jew with a Czech passport, continued to suffer. However, his predicament only sharpened his perceptiveness, and the final period of his life became the years of insight.
The Nightmare of Reason
Author: Ernst Pawel
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374523355
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 502
Book Description
A comprehensive and interpretative biography of Franz Kafka that is both a monumental work of scholarship and a vivid, lively evocation of Kafka's world.
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374523355
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 502
Book Description
A comprehensive and interpretative biography of Franz Kafka that is both a monumental work of scholarship and a vivid, lively evocation of Kafka's world.