Download or read book Kafka Americana written by Jonathan Lethem and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2001 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Previously published only in a signed, limited edition, "Kafka Americana" has achieved cult status. In an act of literary appropriation, the authors seize a helpless Kafka by the lapels and thrust him into the cultural wreckage of 20th century America.
Download or read book Journey Through America written by Wolfgang Koeppen and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume by one of the best known German authors of the postwar period, is one of observation, analysis, and writing, and is based on his 1958 trip to the United States. Here the author presents a portrait of the United States in the late 1950s: its major cities, its literary culture, its troubled race relations, its multi-culturalism and its vast loneliness, a motif drawn, in part, from Kafka's Amerika. A modernist travelogue, the text employs symbol, myth, and image, as if the author sought to answer de Tocqueville's questions in the manner of Joyce and Kafka. It is also a meditation on America, intended for a German audience and mindful of the destiny of postwar Europe under many Americanizing influences.
Download or read book Kafka s Italian Progeny written by Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-01-06 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores Kafka's sometimes surprising connections with key Italian writers, from Italo Calvino to Elena Ferrante, who shaped Italy's modern literary landscape.
Download or read book American Jewish Fiction written by Josh Lambert and published by Jewish Publication Society. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new volume in the JPS Guides series is a fiction reader?s dream: a guide to 125 remarkable works of fiction. The selection includes a wide range of classic American Jewish novels and story collections, from 1867 to the present, selected by the author in consultation with a panel of literary scholars and book industry professionals. Roth, Mailer, Kellerman, Chabon, Ozick, Heller, and dozens of other celebrated writers are here, with their most notable works. Each entry includes a book summary, with historical context and background on the author. Suggestions for further reading point to other books that match readers? interests and favorite writers. And the introduction is a fascinating exploration of the history of and important themes in American Jewish Fiction, illustrating how Jewish writing in the U.S. has been in constant dialogue with popular entertainment and intellectual life. Included in this guide are lists of book award winners; recommended anthologies; title, author, and subject indexes; and more.
Download or read book Journal of the Kafka Society of America written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Kafka s Architectures written by Ayad B. Rahmani and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-01-02 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adopting Kafka as a lens to examine modern concepts in architecture, this book pries open new interpretations in Kafka scholarship. Each of eight chapters takes up an architectural element with which to explore meanings central to both literature and architecture. Stairs function as vertical access but in Kafka's hands become an instrument of science, testing the merit of natural selection. Kafka's doors open and close less to allow passage than to reconcile one psychological interior with the next. Notions of plumbing and hygiene begin to acquire new meaning. The architecture of Mies van der Rohe begins to make more sense, especially his tabula rasa approach to design, signifying less a harsh disdain for site and more a response to a reality in which the ceremony of the stairs had died and was replaced by the pervasive flatness of the modern floor.
Download or read book Masters of Two Arts written by Carlo Testa and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carlo Testa demonstrates that while pairings of famed directors and writers are commonplace in modern Italian cinema, the study of the interrelation between Italian cinema and European literature has been almost completely neglected in film scholarship.
Download or read book Kafka Americana written by Jonathan Lethem and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an act of literary appropriation by turns witty, affectionate, and shameless, Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz seize a helpless Franz Kafka by the lapels and thrust him into the cultural wreckage of twentieth-century America. In the collaboratively written "Receding Horizon," Hollywood welcomes Kafka as a scriptwriter for Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, with appropriately morbid results. Scholz's "The Amount to Carry" transports "the legal secretary of the Workman's Accident Insurance Institute" to a professional conference with fellow insurance executives Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives, for a night of musing on what can and can't be insured. And Lethem's "K for Fake" brings together Orson Welles, Jerry Lewis, and Rod Serling in a kangaroo trial where Kafka faces, needless to say, fraudulent charges. Taking Modernism's presiding genius for a literary joyride, the authors portray an absurd, ominous world that Kafka might have invented but could never have survived. Book jacket.
Download or read book The Nonconformists written by Brian K. Goodman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-20 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How risky encounters between American and Czech writers behind the Iron Curtain shaped the art and politics of the Cold War and helped define an era of dissent. “In some indescribable way, we are each other’s continuation,” Arthur Miller wrote of the imprisoned Czech playwright Václav Havel. After a Soviet-led invasion ended the Prague Spring, many US-based writers experienced a similar shock of solidarity. Brian Goodman examines the surprising and consequential connections between American and Czech literary cultures during the Cold War—connections that influenced art and politics on both sides of the Iron Curtain. American writers had long been attracted to Prague, a city they associated with the spectral figure of Franz Kafka. Goodman reconstructs the Czech journeys of Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, and John Updike, as well as their friendships with nonconformists like Havel, Josef Škvorecký, Ivan Klíma, and Milan Kundera. Czechoslovakia, meanwhile, was home to a literary counterculture shaped by years of engagement with American sources, from Moby-Dick and the Beats to Dixieland jazz and rock ’n’ roll. Czechs eagerly followed cultural trends in the United States, creatively appropriating works by authors like Langston Hughes and Ernest Hemingway, sometimes at considerable risk to themselves. The Nonconformists tells the story of a group of writers who crossed boundaries of language and politics, rearranging them in the process. The transnational circulation of literature played an important role in the formation of new subcultures and reading publics, reshaping political imaginations and transforming the city of Kafka into a global capital of dissent. From the postwar dream of a “Czechoslovak road to socialism” to the neoconservative embrace of Eastern bloc dissidence on the eve of the Velvet Revolution, history was changed by a collision of literary cultures.
Download or read book Kafka s Zoopoetics written by Naama Harel and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nonhuman figures are ubiquitous in the work of Franz Kafka, from his early stories down to his very last one. Despite their prominence throughout his oeuvre, Kafka’s animal representations have been considered first and foremost as mere allegories of intrahuman matters. In recent years, the allegorization of Kafka’s animals has been poetically dismissed by Kafka’s commentators and politically rejected by posthumanist scholars. Such critique, however, has yet to inspire either an overarching or an interdiscursive account. This book aims to fill this lacuna. Positing animal stories as a distinct and significant corpus within Kafka’s entire poetics, and closely examining them in dialogue with both literary and posthumanist analysis, Kafka’s Zoopoetics critically revisits animality, interspecies relations, and the very human-animal contradistinction in the writings of Franz Kafka. Kafka’s animals typically stand at the threshold between humanity and animality, fusing together human and nonhuman features. Among his liminal creatures we find a human transformed into vermin (in “The Metamorphosis”), an ape turned into a human being (in “A Report to an Academy”), talking jackals (in “Jackals and Arabs”), a philosophical dog (in “Researches of a Dog”), a contemplative mole-like creature (in “The Burrow”), and indiscernible beings (in “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People”). Depicting species boundaries as mutable and obscure, Kafka creates a fluid human-animal space, which can be described as “humanimal.” The constitution of a humanimal space radically undermines the stark barrier between human and other animals, dictated by the anthropocentric paradigm. Through denying animalistic elements in humans, and disavowing the agency of nonhuman animals, excluding them from social life, and neutralizing compassion for them, this barrier has been designed to regularize both humanity and animality. The contextualization of Kafka's animals within posthumanist theory engenders a post-anthropocentric arena, which is simultaneously both imagined and very real.
Download or read book Subjects and Simulations written by Anne O'Byrne and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-11-05 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Subjects and Simulations presents essays focused on suffering and sublimity, representation and subjectivity, and the relation of truth and appearance in the twenty-first century. Inspired by the work of Jean Baudrillard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and JeanLuc Nancy, sixteen authors study how the real reasserts itself in an age of every more fragmented media, and how art and literature give us access to forms of truth that elude philosophy. How does representation grant us access to the place once occupied by the subject? Is political life possible? Can plural thinking be retrieved? Will metaphor and simulation give us ways of being in an evanescent world? The volume engages discussions of French and Continental philosophy, post-structuralism, deconstruction, simulacra, aesthetics, existentialism, and media theory.
Download or read book Genre and Extravagance in the Novel written by Jed Rasula and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses an anomaly in the novel as genre: the generic promise to readers—that "reading a novel" is a familiar and repeatable experience—is challenged by the extravagant exceptions to this rule. Furthermore, these exceptions (such as Moby-Dick, Ulysses, or To the Lighthouse) are sui generis, hybrid concoctions that cannot be said to be typical novels. The novel, then, as literary form, succeeds by extravagantly disregarding or even disavowing the protocols of its own genre. Examining a number of famous examples from Don Quixote to Nostromo, this book offers an anatomy of exceptions that illustrate the structural role of their exceptionality for the prestige of the novel as literary form.
Download or read book The Fortunes of German Writers in America written by Wolfgang Elfe and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Kafka s Blues written by Mark Christian Thompson and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kafka's Blues proves the startling thesis that many of Kafka's major works engage in a coherent, sustained meditation on racial transformation from white European into what Kafka refers to as the "Negro" (a term he used in English). Indeed, this book demonstrates that cultural assimilation and bodily transformation in Kafka's work are impossible without passage through a state of being "Negro." Kafka represents this passage in various ways—from reflections on New World slavery and black music to evolutionary theory, biblical allusion, and aesthetic primitivism—each grounded in a concept of writing that is linked to the perceived congenital musicality of the "Negro," and which is bound to his wider conception of aesthetic production. Mark Christian Thompson offers new close readings of canonical texts and undervalued letters and diary entries set in the context of the afterlife of New World slavery and in Czech and German popular culture.
Download or read book Newsletter of the Kafka Society of America written by and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book More Alive and Less Lonely written by Jonathan Lethem and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Ecstasy of Influence comes a new collection of essays that celebrates a life spent in books More Alive and Less Lonely collects over a decade of Jonathan Lethem’s finest writing on writing, with new and previously unpublished material, including: impassioned appreciations of forgotten writers and overlooked books, razor-sharp critical essays, and personal accounts of his most extraordinary literary encounters and discoveries. Only Lethem, with his love of cult favorites and the canon alike, can write with equal insight into classic writers like Charles Dickens and Herman Melville, modern masters like Lorrie Moore and Thomas Pynchon, graphic novelist Chester Brown, and science fiction outlier Philip K. Dick. Sharing his infectious love for books of all kinds, More Alive and Less Lonely is a bracing voyage of literary discovery and an essential addition to every booklover’s shelf.
Download or read book Performance Exile and America written by S. Jestrovic and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-10-22 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection investigates dramatic and performative renderings of 'America' as an exilic place particularly focusing on issues of language, space and identity. It looks at ways in which immigrants and outsiders are embodied in American theatre practice and explores ways in which 'America' is staged and dramatized by immigrants and foreigners.
