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..

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. This work concludes with a reconstruction and critique of the approaches to Kafka by such major critics as Adorno, Gilman, and Deleuze and Guattari.

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