Kafka for the Twenty-First Century

[Roland Reu]ß's exegesis of manuscript facsimiles from [Franz Kafka]'s octavo notebooks calls into question decades of scholarship that took the published versions of Kafka's wording for granted with respect to the three novel fragments and the many other writings that remained unpublished in his lifetime. Designating these manuscripts as "drafton the way to becoming text" (25), Reuß delves into important nuances of Kafka's switch from pen and ink to the more tenuous medium of pencil in the octavos, and his experimentation with such "material parameters" as page layout and line length. Through careful scrutiny of Kafka's autobiographical writing and such fiction as The Castle, Mark Harman exposes the fundamental skepticism about language that underlies Kafka's construction of metaphors that reflect on the "inherent deceitfulness of figurative language" (57). [Walter Sokel] opens with a succinct definition of Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian that enables one to view Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis positively, as an overcoming of Gregor's ego and individuation, and to find significant Nietzschean analogies in "The Judgment" and "Josephine, the Singer, or the Mouse People." Uta Denger presents another perspective on "The Judgment" in her treatment of the story's father-son conflict as an allegory of conflict between the realist and aestheticist approaches to literature, and relates the work to Gustave Flaubert's application of the poetic to the prosaic. Expanding upon Judith Butler's concept of gender melancholy, Katja Garloffexplores in considerable depth the erotic dimension of "A Report for an Academy" and relates the notion of "racial melancholy" to Kafka's subversive treatment of dominant discourses on Jewish assimilation. Jacob Burnett's provocative reading of Kafka's The Castle introduces, among other things, Nietzsche on the death of God and Douglas Hofstader's concept of the "strange loop," to explain the protagonist K.'s futile striving to access the castle as the result of K.'s premodern insistence that the castle functions as a "transcendental signifier" in a modern world lacking a "grounding center."