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Kaj Bernh. Genell : On The Kafkaesque

Ban Israel

"Fiction shows us enormously interesting things about humans, things that - paradoxically - are much more interesting than humans themselves. ."



The uniqueness of the works of Franz Kafka and the perplexing historical accuracy of the concept of the Kafkaesque are both phenomena that over the years have been noticed by many readers and scholars. This book tries to unravel the enigma of the concept, by reference to the process of creation, and to Kafka´s implicit use of two unconscious levels within the fictive universe of his most important works. A fruitful explanation of the uniqueness and of the accuracy of these works has been missing. Strange - Kafkaesque - features have been attributed to the short stories and the novels of Kafka. The kafka hero has - rightly - been seen as a mere figure, and the “dream-like” landscape-universe has been seen as a characteristic, and one has been looking upon these entities, together with a few stylistic features, as dominants in the shaping of the concept of the Kafkaesque.




This book displays a model and an actual explanation to these features, as well as to what is denoted by the concept, from the perspective of a dynamic contextual center, explained in a model containing three levels, levels found within the discourse of Kafka. The veil of mystery may never be lifted when it comes to Kafka´s classics of Modernity. but it might be essential to know about the technique behind the Kafkaesque to be able to reflect upon the Self-consciousness of Modern Man of the 20ieth century, a century so intensely marked by a dialogue between society and the works and ideas of Sigmund Freud. Self-consciousness of Man, as it appeared with St. Augustine, the great Italian Renaissance writers, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, the German secular Romantics and Hegel, swiftly developed into something even much more complex with the appearance of Freud and the publication of his Traumdeutung in the year of 1900, and, more so, with the creation of the Kafkaesque, with the works of Kafka, around 1912.


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