Kafka's hundred year anniversary

ColoradoGuy

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It's been a century since Franz Kafka published his breakthrough story, "The Judgement." The Times Literary Supplement has a great essay on his impact on literature, and embedded in it are reviews of five recent books about Kafka. It's a feast.

"We are probably no nearer to understanding that or any other of his works today than his first readers were, nor should we expect to be."

As an example of the intense and unique way Kafka looked at language, consider this, from his diary:

"In general, the spoken sentence starts off from the speaker with its initial capital letter, curves in its course, as far as it can, out to the audience, and returns with the period to the speaker. But if the period is omitted then the sentence, no longer held in check, falls upon the listener immediately with full force.”

Anybody got Kafkaesque thoughts?
 

TerzaRima

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No thoughts, but a joke:

Franz Kafka walks into a bar. He orders a dry martini. The bartender asks, “Do you want that with an olive or a twist?” And Kafka replies, “I choose despair.”

Okay, as a joke it sort of sucks.
 

HarryHoskins

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Anybody got Kafkaesque thoughts?

You'd get more answers if you didn't use the boomerang-shaped, quasi-period, question mark. If Kafka and me are correct, you will soon respond with your own thoughts to your own question due to the inevitable curve of punctuation.

You shoulda gone with a dot-dot-dot, but then you might've got some talk about Friedrich Clemens Gerke, unless you dotted incorrectly, in which case you might've got some chat about Nietzsche, Huckleberry Finn and some Nepalese tough guys.

All in all this language business is a potential mine field. And, considering I haven't had mine felt for quite a while I will have to withdraw to my room for a while to have a small maxium brood.

No thoughts, but a joke:

I heard the same joke, but it was Popeye, Chubby Checker and Kierkegaard in the bar. I think the bartender was either Rowan and/or Martin.
 
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Eliza azilE

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I never understood "The Judgement."

"Hunger Artist," on the other hand, brings me pretty close to tears.
 

Eliza azilE

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Utter nonsense. Anybody who doesn't understand The Trial or The Castle never experienced the 20th century.

caw

Utter nonsense. A strictly political reading leaves out the Gnosticism, the familial guilt, and a host of other prevalent themes.
 

writeontime

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I don't have any Kafkaesque thoughts at the moment...

All I can add is that The Trial and The Castle still remain highly relevant literary interpretations of socio-political-legal culture.

Time spent in a particular Asian country some years ago brought this home full-force.
 

blacbird

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For what it's worth, today is also the 100th anniversary of the first appearance in a Major League baseball game of a fellow named George Herman Ruth, who soon got a familiar nickname.

caw
 

William Haskins

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"Helene, once again you are a wonderful person and you have lived a great life and I envy it. And I want it someday, but just in the future. You need somebody who-- who understands your references. Who is Kafkaesque? I've never-- I don't know him.
-Michael Scott, The Office


 

William Haskins

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Utter nonsense. Anybody who doesn't understand The Trial or The Castle never experienced the 20th century.

caw

Utter nonsense. A strictly political reading leaves out the Gnosticism, the familial guilt, and a host of other prevalent themes.

Where did I say anything about a "strictly political reading"?

Kafka is the most important writer of fiction since 1900, on every level.

caw

i would suggest that the psychological underpinnings of kafka's work (including the gnosticism... in my opinion, as a stepping stone to atheism, even if unconscious) in the context of the time in which he lived and wrote dovetailed cozily into the political angst of the time, and that a political reading and a psychological reading are hardly mutually exclusive.