Lambent traces : Franz Kafka / Stanley Corngold.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Corngold, Stanley.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

German literature.

Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924--Criticism and interpretation.

Kafka, Franz.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (288 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, c2004.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

On the night of September 22, 1912, Franz Kafka wrote his story "The Judgment," which came out of him "like a regular birth." This act of creation struck him as an unmistakable sign of his literary destiny. Thereafter, the search of many of his characters for the Law, for a home, for artistic fulfillment can be understood as a figure for Kafka's own search to reproduce the ecstasy of a single night. In Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, the preeminent American critic and translator of Franz Kafka traces the implications of Kafka's literary breakthrough. Kafka's first concern was not his responsibility to his culture but to his fate as literature, which he pursued by exploring "the limits of the human." At the same time, he kept his transcendental longings sober by noting--with incomparable irony--their virtual impossibility. At times Kafka's passion for personal transcendence as a writer entered into a torturous and witty conflict with his desire for another sort of transcendence, one driven by a modern Gnosticism. This struggle prompted him continually to scrutinize different kinds of mediation, such as confessional writing, the dream, the media, the idea of marriage, skepticism, asceticism, and the imitation of death. Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka concludes with a reconstruction and critique of the approaches to Kafka by such major critics as Adorno, Gilman, and Deleuze and Guattari.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations for Kafka Citations

Introduction: Beginnings

Chapter 1. In the Circle of "The Judgment"

Chapter 2. The Trial: The Guilt of an Unredeemed Literary Promise

Chapter 3. Medial Interferences in The Trial

Chapter 4. Allotria and Excreta in "In the Penal Colony"

Chapter 5. Nietzsche, Kafka, and Literary Paternity

Chapter 6. Something to Do with the Truth

Chapter 7. "A Faith Like a Guillotine"

Chapter 8. Kafka and the Dialect of Minor Literature

Chapter 9. Adorno's "Notes on Kafka"

Chapter 10. On Translation Mistakes, with Special Attention to Kafka in Amerika

Chapter 11. The Trouble with Cultural Studies

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612129544

9781282129542

1282129546

9781400826131

1400826136

OCLC:

646805570