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Kevin Kuhn's novel Hikikomori is a postmodern Entwicklungsroman. In this essay, I read the novel as a subversion of the neoliberal paradigm, which manifests itself in an omnipresence of self-optimisation options, that the protagonist Till is constantly encouraged to take advantage of. By withdrawing into his room and creating a collaborative online world, Till rejects the cult of individuality modelled by his plastic surgeon father and his interior designer mother. Rather than going on a scheduled journey of self-enhancement around the world, I will argue that it is his virtual journey that attempts self-realisation. However, this rejection of a Weltanschauung based on economic principles comes at the price of exclusion from the analogue world, which bears many parallels with one of the most famous 20th century German language novellas: Franz Kafka's Die Verwandlung. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I discuss what I call 'the other vow', a vow that undoes all others. Interweaving an aphorism from Kafka, Juliet's speech from Romeo & Juliet, and the Jewish liturgical passage Kol Nidrei, I argue that we might find ways to inhabit language differently in the other vow – not the God of the name, or the God of the father, but rather a relation to the other to be otherwise. Instead, we might practice an affirmative denial and collectively attempt to undo the oaths and names that bind us, legally, socially, economically, in order to live in a different way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lenka Reinerová is considered a contemporary witness of both the 20th and 21st centuries and the last German writer in Prague. Indeed, she is the last known prose writer from Prague who wrote in German and boasts a long list of famous predecessors, such as Franz Kafka, Max Brod, E. E. Kisch and others. Interestingly, Reinerová did not only earn a place among the Prague German literature writers because of her mother tongue. In her memoirs, she also engages with literary and academic discourse on the German-language literature coming from Prague. The following article aims to describe this continuity in more detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In 2022, I adapted for the stage Franz Kafka's 1914 short story "In the Penal Colony" and intertextualized the text with devised narratives about the body in pain. I theorize both the staged performance and this reflexive essay as a method of embodied intertextual resistance within literary performance practice to unearth the relationships between performance and writing, body and machine, and the page and the stage. I highlight three moments of intertextual vignettes within the production to highlight the role of literary performance in healing both ourselves and the world around us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El presente artículo aborda la compleja relación de Franz Kafka con su identidad judía, explorando la intersección entre su biografía, escritos y contexto cultural. A través de su literatura personal, Kafka retrató la tensión entre la asimilación y la tradición, rebelándose contra la primera a través de una búsqueda de un ideal del yo judío en múltiples facetas de la judeidad: desde el yidishismo hasta el sionismo. Su búsqueda representó un desafío a la dinámica de la asimilación y fue un intento de emanciparse de la totalizante figura de su padre, Hermann, quien encarna las consecuencias de la asimilación en la autonarración de Kafka. La búsqueda del yo judío llevó a Kafka a enfrentar tensiones inherentes a la experiencia del antisemitismo, pero también al anhelo por una identidad estable que, al igual que muchos de sus contemporáneos, supuso la búsqueda de toda una vida.

Este artículo aborda la lectura del conjunto de la obra de Sara Mesa a la luz de lo kafkiano. Pese a sus diferencias estéticas, Mesa comparte con Kafka su interés por el poder ejercido sobre el individuo en distintos ámbitos, desde el familiar hasta el de la administración pública. En este sentido, es la crónica narrativa Silencio administrativo el texto de Mesa que más abiertamente asume lo kafkiano. La perspectiva de personajes anómalos, desarraigados y juzgados, la atención a la animalidad y el cultivo de lo grotesco son otros aspectos que emparentan a dos autores que entienden la literatura como una búsqueda de la verdad, sin concesiones al lector.

Review of: Carmen Borbély, Erika Mihálycsa, Petronia Petrar (eds.), Temporalities of Modernism, Milano, Ledizioni, 2022

The study focuses on three authors of contemporary Hungarian literature who enter into a dialogue with Kafka’s texts through intertextual references and elevate these intertexts to the level of textforming elements in their own works. It examines Kafkaesque intertexts in Péter Esterházy’s Indirect (Függő) and The Book of Hrabal (Hrabal könyve), Mihály Kornis’s drama Punishments (Büntetések), Szilárd Borbély’s poetry collection Berlin — Hamlet and his posthumously published fragmentary novel Kafka’s Son (Kafka fia). Based on the analyses carried out, it can be concluded that Kafka’s significance for contemporary Hungarian literature is not limited to the simplistic category of literary influence, but involves multifaceted and complex interactions that, in the case of all three authors under study, are related to the desire to transcend the prevailing literary discourse.

Dieser Aufsatz analysiert die prägende Anwesenheit Franz Kafkas in der Prosa und den autobiografischen Texten des DDR-Dramatikers Heiner Müller (1929–1995), also in dessen Gedichten, Schriften, Autobiografie sowie Interviews und Gesprächen. Wenn Kafkas Schriften in Müller Theaterstücken unmittelbar als wichtige Bezugspunkte in der Beschreibung der DDR als politisches Gräuelmärchen zu betrachten sind, trat er in den privaten und selbstbezogenen Texten Müllers damit sowohl als Stimme und Metapher seines dem Schreiben verschriebenen Lebens, als auch als Modell von Müllers tragischer Ironie auf. Nach dem Untergang der DDR wurde der Prager Autor in Müllers Schriften, die die letzte Metamorphose des Dramatikers bis in das berufliche und existenzielle Schweigen begleiteten, sogar zum Dispositiv. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literary debates of the first two decades of the German Democratic Republic, the work of Franz Kafka generally served as a foil for how not to write socialist literature. Assessments of Kafka's work and legacy either opposed the modernist Kafka against socialist realist principles or fashioned the Prague author into a perceptive critic of bourgeois, capitalist society who, nevertheless, stopped short of grasping the underlying causes of the circumstances he critiqued and whose insights into the alienation of his times remained irrelevant for the socialist present. This article complicates this early reception of Kafka in the GDR by focusing on contributions of the East German delegation to the 1963 international Kafka conference in Liblice, Czechoslovakia, which invited Marxists from both East and West to discuss Kafka's potential relevance for socialist societies, resulting in an unprecedented political critique of alienation under really existing socialism from many invitees. While the East German delegation largely refrained from such conclusions, critic Ernst Schumacher's speech departs from the consensus of his East German peers: coining the notion of 'double estrangement' (doppelte Verfremdung) to describe the interpretive uncertainty of Kafka's writing as well as its emancipatory, imaginative dimensions, Schumacher eventually extols its utopian potential to allow it to reflect the new social reality of the GDR's future as negotiated by the GDR's community of readers and writers (Literaturgesellschaft). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This essay explores the language of retraction. The focus is on two sections of Franz Kafka's Der Proceß in which a variety of different attempts are made to take back something that has been said and, in some cases, to provide a substitute for it. The antinomy that emerges—all utterances can be rescinded; no utterances can be rescinded—unsettles any simple identity between communication and community. Ultimately, a discourse may prove most stable when its participants can never be entirely confident that they all share a common tongue and are thus disinclined to expect that their own speech acts will be respected or even understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay emphasizes Franz Kafka's use of the page surface when analyzing the relationship between his draftsmanship and writing. The context of the page, including its size, orientation, margins, and blank spaces, becomes relevant when examining the mise en page, i.e., the placement of drawings and text on a page or sheet of paper. In the early twentieth century, the page and its characteristics, ranging from the materiality of the paper to the mise en page (the French term for "layout"), had been a focus in book design. However, in art history, this term is not commonly used to assess the composition of drawings, as often the type of paper, drawing instruments, or the paper's color and receptivity to ink have been foregrounded. In literary studies, and mainly in genetic criticism that analyzes drafts and other preparatory documents in addition to the finalized text, the mise en page is also not of primary interest. In Kafka's case, however, considering his use of the page surface extends existing analyses focusing on the text-image relationship regarding Kafka's draftsmanship. Furthermore, this focus on the mise en page demonstrates that examining the page's context can also enhance the study of sketches that other writers, such as Samuel Beckett and Paul Valéry, added to their texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Franz Kafka, intrigued by the possibility of representing movement in a still medium, made several drawings of galloping horses. This essay examines these drawings in the context of contemporaneous attempts to capture dynamic motion in visual media. Around 1900, artists and scientists experimented with various painting styles and photographic techniques to depict the movement of human and animal bodies in highbrow art, popular entertainment, and to advance the science of sport. Kafka's short literary work "Wunsch, Indianer zu werden" represents a related attempt to depict the movement of a horse and rider. This essay draws a parallel between the destabilizing effects of Kafka's visual and literary representations of a horse in motion, which reveal the productive tensions that arise from representing movement in each medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impulsionado pela sugestiva denominação de ‘atmosfera kafkiana’ que a crítica literária dá à situação de prisão de Graciliano Ramos em Memórias do cárcere (1953), o presente artigo propõe o cotejo da dimensão paradoxal da obra de Kafka, e sua possível relação com situações políticas e jurídicas marcadas pelo absurdo ou pela exceção, com o romance de Ramos. Nesse desiderato, a princípio, poremos em diálogo a obra de Kafka e a de alguns filósofos, a fim de relacionar questões da obra do tcheco com as noções de banalidade do mal, cara a Hannah Arendt, e de estado de exceção, em Giorgio Agamben. Esses pontos nos permitirão atar as duas problemáticas do artigo, em prol de estabelecer em que consiste a dimensão de totalitarismo/autoritarismo e de irresolução constante na obra do escritor tcheco, mas também a dimensão kafkiana na obra de Graciliano Ramos.

When approaching the climate crisis, there appears to be a universal tendency towards philosophical suicide. When faced with the sheer scale of the problem at hand, falling for the façade of easy solutions seems to be an expected response. However, this tendency towards philosophical suicide may complicate the fight against the climate crisis by drawing attention away from the problem at hand. To approach this problem, the overarching purpose of this article is to determine how the change in the philosophical approach to the absurd may assist in framing the fight against climate change. During the investigation into this problem, it was found that philosophical suicide is a real problem that may be chosen when easy solutions are offered for a problem that sufficiently threatens the individual’s state of existence. Furthermore, this philosophical suicide threatens the fight against climate change due to it leading individuals to believe lies perpetrated through strategies like greenwashing. This is of crucial importance since philosophical suicide threatens the fight against the climate crisis by not allowing individuals to consciously approach the problem. However, there does appear to be some hope. If the newer generations are sufficiently educated on the topic, there may be a chance that philosophical suicide, as well as the prevailing sense of dread that appears to be rampant in the younger generations, can be countered. In this way, educating individuals may enable them to consciously approach the absurdity of the climate crisis and, in doing so, revolt against it.

RESUMO: Este artigo apresenta um estudo comparativo entre a obra literária A metamorfose, de Franz Kafka, e o filme homônimo produzido e dirigido por Jan Nemec, em 1975. Seguindo os preceitos teóricos para estudos de adaptações cinematográficas propostos por Robert Stam (2006) e Linda Hutcheon (2013), apresentamos uma análise das obras não em busca de uma suposta fidelidade do filme à obra literária, mas sim um estudo dos processos pelos quais o filme, baseando-se na obra literária, constrói significados através da linguagem cinematográfica. A análise mostrou que a obra fílmica não se limita a apenas retratar através de imagens o que na obra literária é narrado, mas que, através do uso de elementos da linguagem cinematográfica, há muitas possibilidades de construção de significados, como as que foram constatadas no presente estudo. Palavras-chaves: Adaptação fílmica. A Metamorfose. Jan Nemec. Franz Kafka. ABSTRACT: This article presents a comparative study between Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and the film of the same name produced and directed by Jan Nemec, in 1975. Based on the theories of film adaptation studies proposed by Robert Stam (2006) and Linda Huntcheon (2013), we present an analysis of these two works, not in search of an alleged fidelity of the film to the literary work, but rather a study of the processes by which the film, based on the literary work, constructs meanings through the cinematographic language. The analysis showed that the film adaptation is not limited to simply portraying through images what the literary work narrates, but, through the use of elements of the film language, there are many possibilities for constructing meanings, such as those found in this study. Key-words: Film adaptation. The Metamorphosis. Jan Nemec. Franz Kafka.

En la narrativa de Ezequiel Martínez Estrada (1895-1964) encontramos la recurrencia de algún síntoma que se convierte en el elemento central sobre el que se edifica el efecto fantástico, marcado por una insistencia que tiende a la exageración y el absurdo. Nos detendremos en “Juan Florido, padre e hijo, minervistas” para observar personajes sometidos a una cefalea incontrolable, al tiempo que los sucesos se van enrareciendo a partir de una atmósfera desconcertante. El autor diseña un final inesperado, trabajado desde la ironía, el grotesco, la sinestesia y la hipérbole que alimentan una mirada crítica respecto del contexto social y político.

The article attempts to find states of joy in a writer whom no one suspects of such affects. In a contradictious way, the authors try to catch the „sad person from Prague” in the act: expressing happiness, revealing states of excitement, or even joy. As a result of their research, the authors conclude that moments of well-being in life are shown in Kafka’s diary entries not as experienced but as squandered. That’s why the eponymous „dis/joy” has such a bitter meaning.

Where is one's voice to be found? Not all architects search for it in both drawing and writing. Eliyahu Keller, an architectural historian working at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, examines one of Lebbeus Woods's distinct early tropes: an ever‐tense continuum between the image and the text. His ocular reading of Woods's scripts diagnoses their involvement with a darkness of an age, not its light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jacques Derrida's scattered remarks on the ambiguous role examples play in the passage between the universal and the singular revolve around an often‐neglected point: any attempt to theorise exemplarity will itself be subject to the law it seeks to account for. This oversight limits scholarship on the subject, but may be amended by returning to the loci classici on exemplarity in Derrida's Glas, La vérité en peinture, Passions, and elsewhere. Moreover, in three texts published in the 1980s: La loi du genre, Préjugés and Psyché, Derrida emphasises how literature is particularly given to 'remark' its own status as literature and as such provides a privileged example of the problem of exemplarity. Another example in which exemplarity is in general singularly implicated is deconstruction itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper inquires into the phenomenon of repetition in the works of Franz Kafka and in what ways it might characterize his way of writing (and his understanding of writing). I begin by making a distinction between three different planes of repetition, or repetitiveness: (1) as a 'method' of production; (2) as a symptom of the characters' situations; and (3) as a representation technique. First, there are different versions of the same text, equivalent in terms of finality, but perhaps also a certain existential rhythm (as exemplified by Kafka's famous 'schedules'). I suggest that a comparative reading of Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas (1810) could provide an insight into this feature of 'productivity'. Second, repetitive characters' situations create certain patterns and beg the question of their complex reader effects. Finally, and in addition to 'classical' discursive repetitions, there are minor textual recurrences (as in his 'breakthrough' story, "The Judgment") and the question whether these can be related to an analogy in technical reproduction. Are they part of an experimental narrative method? Is there a 'sense' to repetition in Kafka and can these provisional distinctions help us understand it? How should their entanglement be described? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reflects on the absurd humour contained in Kafka's novel The Trial in two selected works of Russian literature. Using the example of two texts representing different genres (a short story and a poem) by Daniil Kharms and Vladimir Yermolayev, it shows how these two authors were inspired by this aspect of Kafka's work: in the case of Vladimir Yermolayev, the source of inspiration is completely unquestionable and is already referred to by the direct allusion in the title. The entire poem is then constructed as a lawsuit that originates, unfolds and concludes within the lyrical subject, which is the metaphorical Kafka himself. For Daniil Charms, the source of inspiration is unacknowledged, though obvious: Charms was inspired by one particular passage of Kafka's novel, which he altered in accordance with his poetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study focuses on three authors of contemporary Hungarian literature who enter into a dialogue with Kafka's texts through intertextual references and elevate these intertexts to the level of textforming elements in their own works. It examines Kafkaesque intertexts in Péter Esterházy's Indirect (Függő) and The Book of Hrabal (Hrabal könyve), Mihály Kornis's drama Punishments (Büntetések), Szilárd Borbély's poetry collection Berlin -- Hamlet and his posthumously published fragmentary novel Kafka's Son (Kafka fia). Based on the analyses carried out, it can be concluded that Kafka's significance for contemporary Hungarian literature is not limited to the simplistic category of literary influence, but involves multifaceted and complex interactions that, in the case of all three authors under study, are related to the desire to transcend the prevailing literary discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the possibilities and limitations of the sociolinguistic notion of code-switching for the analysis of multilingual texts, in particular those belonging to literature as it is commonly understood (prose fiction, drama and poetry). In such (con)texts, I argue, code-switching is 'staged': produced rather than reproduced. Even when texts stage bilingual conversations with the aim of imitating real-life speech events, mimesis is mediated by the shift from spoken to written mode, which contrasts with the presence and proximity typical of (spoken) verbal interaction. While this mediation limits the applicability of sociolinguistic notions when discussing literary corpora, several examples from both North America (Junot Díaz, Gloria Anzaldúa and Ana Lydia Vega) and Europe (Lydie Salvayre, Ágota Kristóf, Franz Kafka and Leo Tolstoy) show how literary texts 'stage' code-switching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sketches a theory of modernist memory. Borges provides an entry-point for an exploration of the relation between forgetting and memory in modernism, from which I show that memory (as writing) would not be possible without blockages and failures of remembrance. My main contention is that absolute recall doubling as absolute forgetting in certain corpuses requires a mediation on the function of the 'heart' in modernism. This leads me to sketch a dialectics in which the heart functions as a textual machine which knots forgetting and remembrance, a circumstance which can be generalised to redefine how we understand modernism today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the metamorphic nature of Franz Kafka's writing. I focus in particular on the unpublished manuscripts Kafka left behind, which reveal the structural instability of his texts and the stories they tell. These stories were malleable and adaptive, meaning they changed depending on the writing environment and the materials Kafka used to compose his texts. Max Brod's influential edition of Kafka's manuscripts, however, literally erased Kafka's metamorphic writing style and replaced it with a canonical body of work authorized by "Kafka." This "Kafka," I demonstrate in this essay, is a chimera invented by Brod. Instead of a stable origin or final authority, "Kafka" is better understood, I argue, as shorthand for the long adaptation history, started by Brod himself, of the unpublished metamorphic texts Kafka left behind. In order to illustrate that Kafka's texts are always already a product of their own adaptation history, the essay studies the opening paragraph of The Castle (1926) through the lens of a dozen visual adaptations of this text. The essay is dedicated to a close reading of Olivier Deprez's magnificent adaptation Le Château. D'après Franz Kafka (1999). Overall, I make three interconnected arguments. First, that adaptations are essential to "Kafka," not derivative or secondary in any sense. Second, that visual adaptations in particular echo and expose the metamorphic nature of Kafka's own writings. Finally, that Kafka adaptations are highly media specific, and that the study of medium-specificity must remain an integral part of Adaptation Studies as an academic field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Diyalog Interkulturelle Zeitschrift für Germanistik is the property of Diyalog Interkulturelle Zeitschrift fur Germanistik and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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Diasporic, foreign and immigrant, the Jew may epitomize the condition of the stateless, deterritorialized, uninterruptedly in mutation individual. The theme appears in the works of two twentieth-century fictionists, Franz Kafka’s Amerika, or The Man who Disappeared, and Elisa Lispector’s No Exílio, both from a European reminiscent of the Austro-Hungarian empire, one of them residing in Prague, from where he rarely left, the other, settled in Brazil, where the author produced her literary work.