Slideshow 14.1.
Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924)
Random House Webster’s
Kaf-ka-esque (käf kuh esk') adj.
1. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of
the writings of Franz Kafka.
2. marked by a senseless, disorienting,
often menacing complexity: Kafkaesque
bureaucracies.
[1945-50]
The American Heritage Dictionary
Kafkaesque
SYLLABICATION: Kaf·ka·esque
ADJECTIVE:
1. Of or relating to Franz Kafka or his
writings.
2. 2. Marked by surreal distortion and
often a sense of impending danger:
“Kafkaesque fantasies of the impassive
interrogation, the false trial, the
confiscated passport . . . haunt his
innocence” (New Yorker).
Kafka’s drawings
Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924)
Short Stories
Description of a Struggle (Beschreibung eines Kampfes - 1904-1905)
The Judgment (Das Urteil - September 22-23, 1912)
In the Penal Colony (In der Strafkolonie - October 1914)
The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung - November-December 1915)
A Country Doctor (Ein Landarzt - 1917)
The Hunter Gracchus (Der Jäger Gracchus - 1917)
The Great Wall of China (Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer - 1917)
A Report to an Academy (Ein Bericht für eine Akademie - 1917)
A Hunger Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler - 1922)
The Burrow (Der Bau - 1923-1924)
Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk (Josephine, die Sängerin, oder Das Volk der Mäuse - 1924)
Novels
The Trial (Der Prozeß - 1925)
The Castle (Das Schloß - 1926)
America (Amerika - 1927)
Letters
Letters to Felice
Letters to Ottla
Letters to Milena
Max Brod (May 27, 1884 - December 20, 1968)
Deleuze / Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
“Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all signification, no less than all
designation. . . . There is no longer any proper sense or figurative sense, but only a
distribution of states that is part of the range of the word. The thing and other things
are no longer anything but intensities overrun by deterritorialized sound or words that
are following their line of escape.”
“He will turn syntax into a cry that will embrace the rigid syntax of this dried-up
German. He will push it toward a deterritorialization that will no longer be saved by
culture or by myth, that will be absolute deterritorialization, even if it is slow, sticky,
coagulated. To bring language slowly and progressively to the desert. To use syntax in
order to cry, to give a syntax to the cry.”
Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed
into a gigantic insect.
Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed
into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his
head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of
which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His
numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before
his eyes.
Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed
into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his
head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of
which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His
numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before
his eyes.
What's happened to me? he thought. It was no dream. His room, a regular human bedroom, only
rather too small, lay quiet between the four family walls. Above the table on which a collection of
cloth samples was unpacked and spread out—Samsa was a commercial traveler—hung the picture
which he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put into a pretty gilt frame. It showed
a lady, with a fur cap on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur
muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished!