Kafka for the Twenty-First Century http://avaxho.me/blogs/ChrisRedfield 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