statuskvm.blogg.se

He believes that "The Metamorphosis," "A Hunger Artist," "In the Penal Colony" and "The Judgment" are among the most widely read Kafka stories.

Today, Kafka is in the mainstream of student reading, and of the reading public, which is largely made up of former students, Mr. "It was dark, and I sat down to read it under almost perfect conditions - dark, deserted, spooky." "I found it in the stacks of the Columbia University Library as an undergraduate, never having heard of it before," he said. He recalled when he first unearthed Kafka's most famous short story ("The Metamorphosis") and how "absolutely stupefied" he was. Karl showed a visitor around his book-lined study, it was evident that he is a passionist of the meticulously ordered and maintained book shelf, the straight spine - nothing is crammed or stuck horizontally in the available space. You read 'The Metamorphosis,' which is about a man who wakes up as a big bug, and then you know."Īs Mr. And to find out what that means, you read Kafka. It's the one word that tells us what we are, what we can expect, how the world works. "Kafkaesque," the author says, "defines us.

Karl devotes the entire epilogue to this elusive subject. Karl says in his recently published book, "Franz Kafka: Representative Man" (Ticknor and Fields) and subtitled "Prague, Germans, Jews and the Crisis of Modernism." Mr. The word has become the "representative adjective of our times," Mr. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. "You don't give up, you don't lie down and die. "What's Kafkaesque," he said in an interview in his Manhattan apartment, "is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world. But "what I'm against is someone going to catch a bus and finding that all the buses have stopped running and saying that's Kafkaesque.

Kafka is the only 20th-century literary figure whose name "has entered the language in a way no other writer's has," Mr. Karl, author of an exhaustive critical biography of Franz Kafka, believe that the word is as misused as it is used?

SO just what does this adjective "Kafkaesque" mean? And why does Frederick R.