“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” – Franz Kafka
Unknown to the general public in his lifetime and for a quarter century after his death, the Czech writer Franz Kafka’s (1883-1924) enduring influence on global literature and culture is difficult to overestimate. His very name remains a catchword for the nightmarish, dead end experiences peculiar to our modernity: “Kafkaesque.” But in addition to the portentous images conjured by this word – scenes of bureaucracy and power, shame and guilt, disorientation and derealization – Kafka’s work itself explores weird, funny, and fabulous terrain not immediately associated with his name. Estrangement might entail despair, but also laughter. Kafka wrote numerous fables of transformation in which we encounter a veritable bestiary of nonhuman and more-than-human beings, including talking jackals, mouse folk, the bug, the ape, the philosopher dog, the cat-lamb, the scavenging bird, the doll, and the animated bobbin (Odradek). This course aims to approach the author in all his disquieting strangeness and complexity. We examine Kafka’s development as a writer by closely reading the major works (“The Judgement,” “The Metamorphosis,” The Trial, Amerika/The Missing Person, “In the Penal Colony,” The Castle) alongside generous selections from his short fiction, his diary, his letters, and his aphorisms. To help contextualize his texts, we consult their formative reception by the German-Jewish intellectuals Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, and Walter Benjamin.