Franz Kafka

by Sander L. Gilman

Franz Kafka remains one of the central intellectual and cultural figures of our time. Eighty years after his death his work and life continues to fascinate readers and writers. The aura of his life and times has become part of the way we see our own world – no matter how we define it – some aspect of it is always ‘Kafkaesque’. This is a short, readable biography and critical overview of Franz Kafka, with an emphasis on the relationship between his life and works as read through his culture and his understanding of his own ‘body’.The life is seen through Kafka’s own writings, letters, and diaries; all are understood as part of an on-going attempt to create an identity for himself and his world. The biography stresses the image and role of the Jew in Kafka’s world of the ‘modern’ and how Kafka, a typical Central European Jew of his time, responds to these attitudes, actions, and stereotypes.The book also looks at the impact of psychoanalysis on Kafka and the creation of his published and unpublished works. The biography contains much material that elucidates how Kafka reshapes such experiences of the world into his literary texts. The final chapter looks at the creation of the ‘Kafka-myth’ after his death, presenting material from the subsequent eighty years, from Walter Benjamin to Ted Hughes and beyond. The book also contains a comprehensive bibliography and filmography.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 4, 1995

About the author

Sander L. Gilman is an American cultural and literary historian. He is known for his contributions to Jewish studies and the history of medicine. He is the author or editor of over ninety books. Gilman's focus is on medicine and the echoes of its rhetoric in social and political discourse.

Reviews

[Talia · Rating 4 out of 5]

super jewish, enjoyed reading about Kafka’s thoty behavior. i love my little boy <333

[Sahib Khan · Rating 5 out of 5]

good to the point

[N · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from his "Coney Island of the Mind", inspired by Kafka

Kafka's Castle stands above the world
like a last bastille
of the Mystery of Existence
Its blind approaches baffle us
Steep paths
plunge nowhere from it
Roads radiate into air
like the labyrinth wires
of a telephone central
thru which all calls are
infinitely untraceable
Up there
it is heavenly weather
Souls dance undressed together
and like loiterers
on the fringes of a fair
we ogle the unobtainable
imagined mystery
Yet away around on the far side
like the stage door of a circus tent
is a wide wide vent in the battlements
where even elephants
waltz thru.

More of the talented Ferlinghetti,
"If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic."