In 1981 Cardinal published a collection of all the short stories which Kafka published during his lifetime, from the first story in 1904, to the last ones published just after his death in 1924 – a working life of precisely 20 years. They are all here in new translations by J.A. Underwood. The edition is interesting […]
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Jorge Luis Borges on Franz Kafka (1981)
Posted in Literary criticism, Short stories
Posted by Simon on May 14, 2021
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/05/14/jorge-luis-borges-franz-kafka/
The Nightmare of Reason: The Life of Franz Kafka by Ernst Pawel (2)
The doubts and misgivings fought back, locked his head in a vise grip, kept him from sleeping, and once again drove him to the edge of madness. (The Life of Franz Kafka by Ernst Pawel, page 346) Pawel’s enjoyable 466-page biography of Franz Kafka falls roughly into two parts. Part one deals with the deep […]
Posted by Simon on October 9, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/10/09/the-nightmare-of-reason-the-life-of-franz-kafka-by-ernst-pawel-2/
The Nightmare of Reason: The Life of Franz Kafka by Ernst Pawel – part one (1984)
‘What do I have in common with the Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.’ (Franz Kafka, 8 January 1914) This is a hugely enjoyable biography of Franz Kafka, chiefly because it is itself so unKafkaesque, so informative and logical and […]
Tagged 1897, 1984, 19th century, anti-Semitism, anxiety, Arnold Schoenberg, Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy, Biography, book, bureaucracy, Chief Inspector Pfohl, Czech National Socialists, Czech nationalism, Der Judenstaat, diet, Emancipation of the Jews, Emperor Franz Joseph, Emperor Joseph II, Ernst Pawel, Felix Weltsch, France, Franz Kafka, Freud, German literature, Gustav Mahler, Hasidic Jews, Hermann Broch, Herrmann Kafka, hypochondria, hysteria, Jewish dietary law, Jewish self-hatred, Jews, Julie Kafka, Kafkaesque, Karl Kraus, kashrut, language, Letter to My Father, Literature, madonna-whore complex, Max Brod, Modernism, Moravia, novels, Oskar Baum, Palestine, paranoia, Prague, prose, prostitutes, Psychoanalysis, sex, short stories, shtetl, Sigmund Freud, terror, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, The Burrow, the Dreyfus Affair, The Nightmare of Reason, The Nightmare of Reason: The Life of Franz Kafka, the Prague Pogrom, The Workmen's Accident and Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, Theodor Herzl, turn-of-the-century, turn-of-the-century Prague, vegetarian, Vienna, Walter Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Yiddish, Zionism
Posted by Simon on October 8, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/10/08/nightmare-of-reason-franz-kafka-biography-ernst-pawel/
John Updike on Franz Kafka (1983)
In 1983 American novelist John Updike was commissioned to write the introduction to a new collection of the complete short stories of Franz Kafka. Here are his main points: Kafka is one of many who reacted to the arrival of the ‘modern’ world around the turn of the century. For him it manifested as: a […]
Posted in Literary criticism, Literature
Tagged 1983, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Christian, Dora Dymant, Franz Kafka, German, German prose, Gregor Samsa, Hermann Kafka, insurance, Investigations of a Dog, Jewish, John Updike, Judaism, Max Brod, Nazis, novelist, Philip Rahv, Psychology, short stories, The Burrow, The Castle, The Great Wall of China, The Judgement, The Metamorphosis, The Trial, the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, Wedding Preparations, Yiddish
Posted by Simon on October 7, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/10/07/john-updike-franz-kafka/
Milan Kundera on Franz Kafka (1979)
In 1979 the Czech novelist Milan Kundera published a short essay about the works of fellow Czech and Prague inhabitant, Franz Kafka. The essay was titled Somewhere behind. Throughout it Kundera uses the adjective ‘Kafkan’, which seems perverse of either him or the translator, because everyone else in the English-speaking world talks about the ‘Kafkaesque’. Four […]
Tagged 1979, A Country Doctor, allegory, bourgeois alienation, bureaucracy, Camus, capitalism, Communism, Czech, Czechoslovakia, essay, Franz Kafka, György Lukács, history, Investigations of a Dog, Jan Skacel, Joseph K, Josephine the Singer, Kafkaesque, literary criticism, Lukacs, Marxism, Milan Kundera, novelist, Prague, short stories, Somewhere Behind, The Burrow, The Castle, The Great Wall of China, The Metamorphosis, The Trial, totalitarianism, W.H. Auden, worldview
Posted by Simon on October 5, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/10/05/milan-kundera-franz-kafka/
Albert Camus on Franz Kafka (1942)
In 1942 Albert Camus published his famous long essay, The Myth of Sisyphus in which he addressed the issue of Suicide i.e. Is the world so empty, pointless and absurd that we might as well cash in our chips? He takes a hundred pages or so to answer No, the basis of his argument being that […]
Posted in Literary criticism, Literature
Tagged 1942, Albert Camus, essay, existentialism, Franz Kafka, Gregor Samsa, György Lukács, Hope, Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Joseph K, Justin O'Brien, Kierkegaard, leap of faith, literary criticism, Max Brod, novel, Philosophy, prose, suicide, The Absurd, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Outsider, The Trial, W.H. Auden, Walter Benjamin
Posted by Simon on October 4, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/10/04/albert-camus-franz-kafka/
György Lukács on Franz Kafka (1955)
Brief biography of György Lukács From the 1920s to the 1960s György Lukács was one of the leading Marxist philosophers and literary critics in Europe. Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1885, the son of a very affluent Jewish banker, he benefited from a superb education and was a leading intellectual at Budapest university, combining interests in […]
Tagged Achilles, Adrian Leverkuhn, Aristotle, bourgeoisie, Budapest, capitalism, Cold War, communist party, Decadence, dialectic, European literature, existentialism, Finnegan's Wake, French existentialism, George Eliot, Goethe, György Lukács, Hegel, history, Homer, humanity, Hungarian Soviet Republic, Hungary, James Joyce, Jewish, Joseph K, Karl Marx, Lenin, literary criticism, Literature, Lotte in Weimar, Man With No Qualities, Martin Heidegger, Marxism, Middlemarch, Modernism, Moscow, naturalism, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, realism, Red Terror, Robert Musil, Samuel Beckett, Sigmund Freud, socialism, Stalin, stream-of-consciousness, T.S. Eliot, the Great War, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, the nineteenth century, The Waste Land, Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, Ulysses, Virginia Woolf, Waiting For Godot, War and Peace, William Faulkner, worldview, Zola
Posted by Simon on October 3, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/10/03/gyorgy-lukacs-franz-kafka/
Vladimir Nabokov on Franz Kafka (1954)
Vladimir Nabokov The eminent Russian novelist, Vladimir Nabokov (1899 – 1971) fled the Russian Revolution to Germany in 1919 moving, eventually, on to France. Then, like many others, he was forced to flee France ahead of the Nazi invasion in 1940, crossing the Atlantic to America. Here he found work as an academic, and taught […]
Posted in Literary criticism, Literature
Posted by Simon on October 2, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/10/02/vladimir-nabokov-franz-kafka/
Max Brod’s book on Kafka and some of my own reflections by Walter Benjamin (1938)
Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, published a biography of Kafka in 1937. The German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin gave his thoughts on the book in a letter to his friend, the Jewish scholar Gerhard Scholem, in June 1938. His comments were then extracted from the letter and published as one of the essays collected in […]
Tagged 1937, 1938, folly, Gerhard Scholem, Illuminations, Judaism, Kafka, Martin Buber, Max Brod, parable, Walter Benjamin
Posted by Simon on September 30, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/09/30/max-brod-franz-kafka-walter-benjamin/
Franz Kafka on the tenth anniversary of his death by Walter Benjamin (1934)
The German-Jewish literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940) published several pieces about Franz Kafka, which were later collected in the selection of his essays titled Illuminations. Franz Kafka on the tenth anniversary of his death (1934) What makes Benjamin so enjoyable to read also makes him difficult to summarise. This is that he proceeds by a […]
Posted in Literary criticism, Literature
Tagged Amerika, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bucephalus, Cervantes, Don Quixote, Ernst Pawel, First Sorrow, folk story, Franz Kafka, German-Jewish, Illuminations, Jewish tradition, Jewishness, Joseph K, K., Leni, literary criticism, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Original Sin, Peter Schlemihl, Plutarch, prehistory, Samuel Beckett, Sancho Panza, the bucket rider, The Burrow, The Castle, The Good Soldier Svejk, The Great Wall of China, the Haggadah, the Halakah, the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, The Trial, Walter Benjamin, Worstward Ho!
Posted by Simon on September 29, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/09/29/walter-benjamin-tenth-anniversary-franz-kafka/
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