Description
After outlining Kafka's life using new biographical information, Thiher examines Kafka's first attempts at writing, often involving nearly farcical experiments. The study then shows how Kafka's work developed through twists and turns, beginning with the breakthrough stories The Judgment and The Metamorphosis, continuing with his first attempt at a novel with Amerika, and followed by Kafka's shifting back and forth between short fiction and two other unpublished novels, The Trial and The Castle.
Thiher also calls on Kafka's notebooks and diaries. These help demonstrate that Kafka never stopped experimenting in his attempt to find a literary form that might satisfy his desire to create some kind of transcendental literary text in an era in which the transcendent is at best an object of nostalgia or of comic derision. In short, Thiher contends, Kafka constantly sought the grounds for writing in a world in which all appears groundless.
About the Author
Allen Thiher is Curators' Distinguished Professor of Romance Languages Emeritus at the University of Missouri-Columbia and is a permanent fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University. His books include Understanding Marcel Proust and Understanding Robert Musil, both published by the University of South Carolina Press, as well as studies of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and Raymond Queneau, an earlier study of Kafka, and books on French cinema, literary theory, and science and literature. He lives in retirement with his wife in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Book Information
ISBN 9781611178289
Author Allen Thiher
Format Hardback
Page Count 312
Imprint University of South Carolina Press
Publisher University of South Carolina Press