Franz Kafka : The Necessity of Form / Stanley Corngold.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Corngold, Stanley, author.

en Book Program, National Endowment for the Humanities Op, Author.

Contributor:

en Book Program, funder.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924.

Kafka, Franz.

Authors, Austrian--20th century--Biography.

Authors, Austrian.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (321 pages)

Place of Publication:

Cornell University Press 2018

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Biography/History:

Stanley Corngold is Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He is the author of Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature, Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka and coauthor of Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine.

Summary:

In Stanley Corngold's view, the themes and strategies of Kafka's fiction are generated by a tension between his concern for writing and his growing sense of its arbitrary character. Analyzing Kafka's work in light of "the necessity of form," which is also a merely formal necessity, Corngold uncovers the fundamental paradox of Kafka's art and life. The first section of the book shows how Kafka's rhetoric may be understood as the daring project of a man compelled to live his life as literature. In the central part of the book, Corngold reflects on the place of Kafka within the modern tradition, discussing such influential precursors of Cervantes, Flaubert, and Nietzsche, whose works display a comparable narrative disruption. Kafka's distinctive narrative strategies, Corngold points out, demand interpretation at the same time they resist it. Critics of Kafka, he says, must be aware that their approaches are guided by the principles that Kafka's fiction identifies, dramatizes, and rejects.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations for Kafka Citations

Introduction

PART I KAFKA'S CAREER

PART II Kafka's C ontext

Excursus on Method

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

This eBook is made available Open Access. Unless otherwise specified in the content, the work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0 https://www.degruyter.com/dg/page/open-access-policy

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Sep 2018)

ISBN:

9781501722813

1501722816

OCLC:

1028953280