![]() In a sense, the English title by which Kafka’s novel is known, The Trial, conveys something of the double meaning of the original German title, Der Process: Josef K. But perhaps it is The Trial, most of all, that is responsible for the most prevalent meaning of the term ‘Kafkaesque’.Īlthough this may strike us as a surprising comparison at first, Spilka shows that these two ostensibly very different writers actually share a great deal: their comic approach to the absurdities of life (even the tragedies of life), their childlike way of viewing the world’s injustices, and – perhaps more importantly for The Trial – their skewering of the endless and nonsensical bureaucratic processes that fill the corridors of law.Īnd Kafka is a comic writer, although he finds humour in the most tragic and unpromising situations, such as the sinister arrest of a man who has apparently done nothing wrong, and his subsequent execution. It depends on how we choose to approach him as to whether we favour ‘The Metamorphosis’ (his long short story, which we have analysed here, about a man who wakes one morning to discover he has been transformed into a ‘vermin’), The Castle (a quest with no end-goal – and no castle), or The Trial. ![]() Three of Kafka’s works stand as his most representative. Perhaps inevitably, he is often misinterpreted as being a gloomy and humourless writer about nightmarish scenarios, when this at best conveys only part of what he is about. His work almost stands alone as its own subgenre, and the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ – whose meaning, like the meaning of Kafka’s work, is hard to pin down – has become well-known even to people who have never read a word of Kafka’s writing. ![]() By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)įranz Kafka (1883-1924) has been called everything from a modernist to an existentialist, a fantasy writer to a realist. ![]()
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