Stanley Corngold & Ruth Gross 
Kafka for the Twenty-First Century 

Franz Kafka’s literary career began in the first decade of the twentieth century and produced some of the most fascinating and influential works in all of modern European literature. Now, a hundred years later, the concerns of a new century call for a look at the challenges facing Kafka scholarship in the decades ahead: What more can we hope to learn about the context in which Kafka wrote? How does understanding that context affect how we read his stories?What are the consequences of new critical editions that offer unprecedented access to Kafka’s works in manuscript form? How does our view of Kafka change the priorities and fashions of literary scholarship? What elements in Kafka’s fiction will find resonance in the historical context of a new millennium? How do we compose a coherent account of a personality with so many contradictory aspects? All these questions and more are addressed by the essays in this volume, written by a group of leading international Kafka scholars.


Contributors: Peter Beicken, Iris Bruce, Jacob Burnett, Uta Degner, Doreen Densky, Katja Garloff, Rolf Goebel, Mark Harman, Robert Lemon, Roland Reuß, Ritchie Robertson, Walter Sokel, John Zilcosky, Saskia Ziolkowski.


Stanley Corngold is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Ruth V. Gross is Professor of German and Head ofthe Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at North Carolina State University.

Table of Content

Introduction

Running Texts, Stunning Drafts

‘Torturing the Gordian Knot’: Kafka and Metaphor Revisited

Nietzsche and Kafka: The Dionysian Connection

What Kafka Learned from Flaubert: Absent-Minded Window-Gazing and The Judgment

Kafka’s Racial Melancholy: ‘A Report to an Academy’

Strange Loops and Absent Center in The Castle

Proxies in Kafka: Koncipist FK and Prokurist Joseph K

Kafka, Goffman, and the Total Institution

Kafka in Virilio’s Teletopical City

Kafka’s Visual Method: The Gaze, the Cinematic, and Intermedial

‘Samsa war Reisender’: Trains, Trauma, and the Unreadable Body

The Comfort of Strangeness: Correlating the Kafkaesque and the Kafkan in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled

Kafka’s Journey into the Future: Crossing Borders into Israeli/Palestinian Worlds

Kafka and Italy: A New Perspective on the Italian Literary Landscape

Works Cited-Full Bibliography

About the author

Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Arlington