Kafka's other Prague : writings from the Czechoslovak Republic / Anne Jamison.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jamison, Anne Elizabeth, 1969- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

Kafka, Franz.

Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924--Knowledge and learning--Czech language.

Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924.

Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924--Homes and haunts--Czech Republic--Prague.

Criticism and interpretation.

Prague (Czech Republic)--Intellectual life--20th century.

Prague (Czech Republic).

Homes.

Intellectual life.

Czech Republic--Prague.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

x, 222 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, [2018]

Summary:

Kafka's Other Prague: Writings from the Czechoslovak Republic examines Kafka's late writings from the perspective of the author's changing relationship with Czech language, culture, and literature--the least understood facet of his meticulously researched life and work. Franz Kafka was born in Prague, a bilingual city in the Habsburg Empire. He died a citizen of Czechoslovakia. Yet Kafka was not Czech in any way he himself would have understood. He could speak Czech, but, like many Prague Jews, he was raised and educated and wrote in German. Kafka critics to date have had little to say about the majority language of his native city or its "minor literature," as he referred to it in a 1913 journal entry. Kafka's Other Prague explains why Kafka's later experience of Czech language and culture matters. Bringing to light newly available archival material, Anne Jamison's innovative study demonstrates how Czechoslovakia's founding and Kafka's own dramatic political, professional, and personal upheavals altered his relationship to this "other Prague." It destabilized Kafka's understanding of nationality, language, gender, and sex--and how all these issues related to his own writing. Kafka's Other Prague juxtaposes Kafka's German-language work with Czechoslovak Prague's language politics, intellectual currents, and print culture--including the influence of his lover and translator, the journalist Milena Jesenská--and shows how this changed cultural and linguistic landscape transformed one of the great literary minds of the last century.

Contents:

Introduction

Kafka and Czech : away from "minor literature"

Kafka and the Czech press

Language territories

"Is there a castle here?" An architecture of disappearing lines

Reading Klam(m)

F:M (the correspondence with Jesenska

"Official decisions are as shy as young girls" : gender in the castle

Of mice and music

Conclusion.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780810137202

0810137208

9780810137219

0810137216

OCLC:

1005109394