Lambent Traces

On the night of September 22, 1912, Franz Kafka wrote his story "The Judgment," which came out of him "like a regular birth." This act of creation struck him as an unmistakable sign of his literary destiny. Thereafter, the search of many of his characters for the Law, for a home, for artistic fulfillment can be understood as a figure for Kafka's own search to reproduce the ecstasy of a single night. In Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, the preeminent American critic and translator of Franz Kafka traces the implications of Kafka's literary breakthrough. Kafka's first concern was not his responsibility to his culture but to his fate as literature, which he pursued by exploring "the limits of the human." At the same time, he kept his transcendental longings sober by noting--with incomparable irony--their virtual impossibility. At times Kafka's passion for personal transcendence as a writer entered into a torturous and witty conflict with his desire for another sort of transcendence, one driven by a modern Gnosticism. This struggle prompted him continually to scrutinize different kinds of mediation, such as confessional writing, the dream, the media, the idea of marriage, skepticism, asceticism, and the imitation of death. Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka concludes with a reconstruction and critique of the approaches to Kafka by such major critics as Adorno, Gilman, and Deleuze and Guattari..

On the night of September 22, 1912, Franz Kafka wrote his story "e;The Judgment,"e; which came out of him "e;like a regular birth."e; This act of creation struck him as an unmistakable sign of his literary destiny. Thereafter, the search of many of his characters for the Law, for a home, for artistic fulfillment can be understood as a figure for Kafka's own search to reproduce the ecstasy of a single night. In Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, the preeminent American critic and translator of Franz Kafka traces the implications of Kafka's literary breakthrough. Kafka's first concern was not his responsibility to his culture but to his fate as literature, which he pursued by exploring "e;the limits of the human."e; At the same time, he kept his transcendental longings sober by noting--with incomparable irony--their virtual impossibility. At times Kafka's passion for personal transcendence as a writer entered into a torturous and witty conflict with his desire for another sort of transcendence, one driven by a modern Gnosticism. This struggle prompted him continually to scrutinize different kinds of mediation, such as confessional writing, the dream, the media, the idea of marriage, skepticism, asceticism, and the imitation of death. Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka concludes with a reconstruction and critique of the approaches to Kafka by such major critics as Adorno, Gilman, and Deleuze and Guattari..

Preface xiAbbreviations for Kafka Citations xviiIntroduction: Beginnings 1Chapter 1In the Circle of "The Judgment" 13Chapter 2The Trial: The Guilt of an Unredeemed Literary Promise 37Segue IOn Cultural Immortality 45Chapter 3Medial Interferences in The Trial 51Or, res in MediaChapter 4Allotria and Excreta in "In the Penal Colony" 67Segue IIDeath and the Medium 81Chapter 5Nietzsche, Kafka, and Literary Paternity 94Chapter 6Something to Do with the Truth 111Kafka's Later StoriesChapter 7"A Faith Like a Guillotine" 126Kafka on SkepticismChapter 8Kafka and the Dialect of Minor Literature 142Chapter 9Adorno's "Notes on Kafka" 158A Critical ReconstructionChapter 10On Translation Mistakes, with Special Attention to Kafka in Amerika 176Chapter 11The Trouble with Cultural Studies 194Notes 205Acknowledgments 253Index 255