Kafka’s Italian Progeny

Kafka’s Italian Progeny
Author: Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2020-01-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1487506309

This book explores Kafka's sometimes surprising connections with key Italian writers, from Italo Calvino to Elena Ferrante, who shaped Italy's modern literary landscape.

Metamorphoses

Metamorphoses
Author: Karolina Watroba
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2024-06-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1639366725

This groundbreaking study of Franz Kafka’s legacy—to be published during the centenary of his death in 2024—explores Kafka’s life and influence in an entirely new and dynamic way. In 2024, exactly one hundred years after his death at the age of forty, readers all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka. Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books filled with mysterious courts and monstrous insects. Who, exactly, was Franz Kafka? Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a fellow of Oxford's All Souls College, will tell Kafka's story beyond the boundaries of language, time, and space, traveling from the Prague of Kafka's birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia, whose award-winning novels are, in part, homages to the great man himself. Metamorphoses presents a non-chronological journey through Kafka's life, combining literary scholarship with the responses of his readers throughout the last century. It is a both an exploration of Kafka's life and an exciting new way of approaching literary history.

Pollak's Arm

Pollak's Arm
Author: Hans von Trotha
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1954404018

"Enthralling ... A great read."—Philippe de Montebello, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art October 16, 1943, inside the Vatican as darkness descends upon Rome. Having been alerted to the Nazi plan to round up the city’s Jewish population the next day, Monsignor F. dispatches an envoy to a nearby palazzo to bring Ludwig Pollak and his family to safety within the papal premises. But Pollak shows himself in no hurry to leave his home and accept the eleventh-hour offer of refuge. Pollak’s visitor is obliged to take a seat and listen as he recounts his life story: how he studied archaeology in Prague, his passion for Italy and Goethe, how he became a renowned antiquities dealer and advisor to great collectors like J. P. Morgan and the Austro-Hungarian emperor after his own Jewishness barred him from an academic career, and finally his spectacular discovery of the missing arm from the majestic ancient sculpture of Laocoön and his sons. Torn between hearing Pollak’s spellbinding tale and the urgent mission to save the archaeologist from certain annihilation, the Vatican’s anxious messenger presses him to make haste and depart. This stunning novel illuminates the chasm between civilization and barbarism by spotlighting a now little-known figure devoted to knowledge and the power of artistic creation.

Franz Kafka in Context

Franz Kafka in Context
Author: Carolin Duttlinger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2018
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107085497

Accessible essays place Kafka in historical, political and cultural context, providing new and often unexpected perspectives on his works.

Midstream

Midstream
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 482
Release: 1997
Genre: Jews
ISBN:

Roberto Calasso ; Translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock

Roberto Calasso ; Translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock
Author: Roberto Calasso
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2005
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781400041893

From the internationally acclaimed author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony comes one of the most significant books in recent years on a writer of perennial interest: Franz Kafka. What are Kafka's fictions about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Countless answers have been offered, but the essential mystery remains intact. Setting out on his own exploration, Roberto Calasso enters the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of Kafka's work to discover why K. and Josef K.-the protagonists of The Castle and The Trial-are so radically different from any other characters in the history of the novel, and to determine who, in the end, K is. The culmination of Calasso's lifelong fascination with Kafka's work, K. is a book of remarkable literary importance. Book jacket.

Kafka

Kafka
Author: William J. Dodd
Publisher: Foyles
Total Pages: 106
Release: 2003
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN:

The World of Franz Kafka

The World of Franz Kafka
Author: Joseph Peter Stern
Publisher: Holt McDougal
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1980
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

"In The World of Franz Kafka, Professor J.P. Stern, the internationally respected critic and historian of modern German literature, brings together a number of writings on widely varying aspects of Kafka's life, work and milieu, most of them specially commissioned for this volume. The book is divided into three parts: the first is biographical, covering such topics as the social and cultural environment of Prague in the last years of the Habsburg Empire; Kafka's own Jewish background and problematic family life; his mysterious unfulfilled relationships with women; and it includes reminiscences, some never before published in English. In the second section of the book Martin Walser, Frank Kermode, Erich Heller, Walter Sokel, Anthony Thorlby, and others deal with the literary problems of interpreting Kafka's work, while the concluding part of the book contains fictional or semi-fictional pieces by writers like Roy Fuller, Philip Roth, and D.J. Enright that were inspired by Kafka and in their turn shed fresh light on him"--Jacket.

Kafka's Zoopoetics

Kafka's Zoopoetics
Author: Naama Harel
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2020-05-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0472902091

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.