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Kafka's Creatures

Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings
Editors:
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
    1. Contents No access
    2. Acknowledgments No access
  1. Chapter 1 Introduction No access
  2. Chapter 2 Kafka’s Hybrids: Thinking Animals and Mirrored Humans No access
  3. Chapter 3 “Czechs, Jews and Dogs Not Allowed”: Identity, Boundary, and Moral Stance in Kafka’s “A Crossbreed” and “Jackals and Arabs” No access
  4. Chapter 4 De-allegorizing Kafka’s Ape: Two Animalistic Contexts No access
  5. Chapter 5 Agents of the Forgotten: Animals as the Vehicles of Shame in Kafka No access
  6. Chapter 6 The Difficult Task of Being Real: Odradek, the Kittenlamb, and the Historical Individual No access
  7. Chapter 7 Consolation in Your Neighbor’s Fur: On Kafka’s Animal Parables No access
  8. Chapter 8 Crowds, Animality, and Aesthetic Language in Kafka’s“Josephine” No access
  9. Chapter 9 Performative Emotion in Kafka’s “Josephine, the Singer; or, the Mouse Folk” and Freud’s “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming” No access
  10. Chapter 10 The Power of the Look: Franz Kafka’s “The Cares of a Family Man” No access
  11. Chapter 11 Four Hands Good, Two Hands Bad No access
  12. Chapter 12 Who Identified the Animal? Hybridity and Body Politics in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared) No access
  13. Chapter 13 The Portrait of an Armor-Plated Sign: Reimagining Samsa’s Exoskeleton No access
  14. Chapter 14 Extraterrestrial Kafka: Ahead to the Graphic Novel No access
  15. Chapter 15 Index to Kafka’s Use of Creatures in His Writings No access
  16. Index No access
  17. About the Contributors No access

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