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Kafka's Creatures
Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings
Editors:
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Publisher:
2010
Summary
There are few literary authors in whose work animals and other creatures play as prominent a role as they do in Franz Kafka's. Exploring multiple dimensions of Kafka's incorporation of nonhuman creatures into his writing, this volume is the first collection in English of essays devoted to illuminating this important and ubiquitous dimension of his work. The chapters here are written by an array of international scholars from various fields, and represent a diversity of interpretive approaches. In the course of exploring the roles played by nonhuman animals and other creatures in Kafka's writing, they help make sense of the literary and philosophical significance of his preoccupation with animals, and make clear that careful investigation of those creatures illuminates his core concerns: the nature of power; the inescapability of history and guilt; the dangers, promise, and strangeness of the alienation endemic to modern life; the human propensity for cruelty and oppression; the limits and conditions of humanity and the risks of dehumanization; the nature of authenticity; family life; Jewishness; and the nature of language and art. Thus the essays in this volume enrich our understanding of Kafka's work as a whole. Especially striking is the extent to which the articles collected here bring into focus the ways in which Kafka anticipated many of the recent developments in contemporary thinking about nonhuman animals.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2010
ISBN-Print
978-0-7391-4394-0
ISBN-Online
978-0-7391-4396-4
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
296
Product type
Edited Book
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Acknowledgments No access
Chapter 1 Introduction No access Pages 3 - 16
Chapter 2 Kafka’s Hybrids: Thinking Animals and Mirrored Humans No access Pages 17 - 32
Chapter 3 “Czechs, Jews and Dogs Not Allowed”: Identity, Boundary, and Moral Stance in Kafka’s “A Crossbreed” and “Jackals and Arabs” No access Pages 33 - 52
Chapter 4 De-allegorizing Kafka’s Ape: Two Animalistic Contexts No access Pages 53 - 66
Chapter 5 Agents of the Forgotten: Animals as the Vehicles of Shame in Kafka No access Pages 67 - 80
Chapter 6 The Difficult Task of Being Real: Odradek, the Kittenlamb, and the Historical Individual No access Pages 81 - 100
Chapter 7 Consolation in Your Neighbor’s Fur: On Kafka’s Animal Parables No access Pages 101 - 118
Chapter 8 Crowds, Animality, and Aesthetic Language in Kafka’s“Josephine” No access Pages 119 - 136
Chapter 9 Performative Emotion in Kafka’s “Josephine, the Singer; or, the Mouse Folk” and Freud’s “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming” No access Pages 137 - 156
Chapter 10 The Power of the Look: Franz Kafka’s “The Cares of a Family Man” No access Pages 157 - 174
Chapter 11 Four Hands Good, Two Hands Bad No access Pages 175 - 190
Chapter 12 Who Identified the Animal? Hybridity and Body Politics in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared) No access Pages 191 - 210
Chapter 13 The Portrait of an Armor-Plated Sign: Reimagining Samsa’s Exoskeleton No access Pages 211 - 236
Chapter 14 Extraterrestrial Kafka: Ahead to the Graphic Novel No access Pages 237 - 268
Chapter 15 Index to Kafka’s Use of Creatures in His Writings No access Pages 269 - 284
