Franz Kafka (1883-1983): His Craft and Thought

Neil Querengesser taught in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Alberta.

This collection of eight papers, originally presented at the Centennial Conference on Franz Kafka at the University of Calgary, reflects the diversity of emerging directions in Kafka scholarship, providing new and sometimes provocative insights into the work of this important writer. Central to the theses of many of these papers is the notion that the term “realism” needs some major reworking in light of recent critical studies on Kafka. The approaches to Kafka’s art vary from the more traditional critical methods of Egon Swartz’s and Ernst Loeb’s respective analyses of Kafka’s animal tales and “In the Penal Colony,” to the reader-response method of Patrick O’Neill’s “The Comedy of Stasis: Narration and Knowledge in Kafka’s Prozess.” Ruth Gross’s “Of Mice and Women: Reflections on a Discourse” is a detailed study of Josephine in “The Bridge” from what might very loosely be termed a feminist perspective. Elsewhere, James Rollenston and Charles Bernheimer both acknowledge Kafka’s debt to the realism of Flaubert in their articles, although with somewhat differing aims. Bernheimer moves toward an analysis of the ever-present tension in Kafka between self-displacement and self-dissolution. Rollensten redefines realism with respect to Kafka in his discussion of the author’s treatment of time and his ties to the romantics. Mark Harman, in “Life into Art,” focuses on Kafka’s diaries as a “literary workshop.” The final piece of the collection, “Meeting Kafka,” by W.G. Kudszus, is an insightful account of a seasoned Kafka scholar’s re-reading of the opening passage of Tile Castle, recreating the reading experience as if for the first time. His concluding remarks reflect the feeling that “the days when Kafka spoke to his readers more directly are gone” but says that “those days may yet return. Reading and understanding Kafka does not have to be a limiting enterprise. Working with him can be creatively frightening.”

The variety of perspectives expressed in this collection of insights into a giant of modern literature offers evidence that the last word on Kafka has not been written.