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Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924)

Random House Webster’s

Kaf-ka-esque (käf kuh esk') adj. 1. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of

the writings of Franz Kafka.2. marked by a senseless, disorienting,

often menacing complexity: Kafkaesque bureaucracies.

[1945-50]

The American Heritage Dictionary

Kafkaesque

SYLLABICATION: Kaf·ka·esque

ADJECTIVE:

1. Of or relating to Franz Kafka or his writings.

2. 2. Marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger: “Kafkaesque fantasies of the impassive interrogation, the false trial, the confiscated passport . . . haunt his innocence” (New Yorker).

Kafka’s drawings

Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924)

Short StoriesDescription of a Struggle (Beschreibung eines Kampfes - 1904-1905)

The Judgment (Das Urteil - September 22-23, 1912)

In the Penal Colony (In der Strafkolonie - October 1914)

The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung - November-December 1915)

A Country Doctor (Ein Landarzt - 1917)

The Hunter Gracchus (Der Jäger Gracchus - 1917)

The Great Wall of China (Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer - 1917)

A Report to an Academy (Ein Bericht für eine Akademie - 1917)

A Hunger Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler - 1922)

The Burrow (Der Bau - 1923-1924)

Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk (Josephine, die Sängerin, oder Das Volk der Mäuse - 1924)

NovelsThe Trial (Der Prozeß - 1925)

The Castle (Das Schloß - 1926)

America (Amerika - 1927)

LettersLetters to Felice

Letters to Ottla

Letters to Milena

Max Brod (May 27, 1884 - December 20, 1968)

Deleuze / Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature

“Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all signification, no less than all designation. . . . There is no longer any proper sense or figurative sense, but only a distribution of states that is part of the range of the word. The thing and other things are no longer anything but intensities overrun by deterritorialized sound or words that are following their line of escape.”

“He will turn syntax into a cry that will embrace the rigid syntax of this dried-up German. He will push it toward a deterritorialization that will no longer be saved by culture or by myth, that will be absolute deterritorialization, even if it is slow, sticky, coagulated. To bring language slowly and progressively to the desert. To use syntax in order to cry, to give a syntax to the cry.”

Metamorphosis

Franz KafkaAs Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Metamorphosis

Franz KafkaAs Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.

Metamorphosis

Franz KafkaAs Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.

What's happened to me? he thought. It was no dream. His room, a regular human bedroom, only rather too small, lay quiet between the four family walls. Above the table on which a collection of cloth samples was unpacked and spread out—Samsa was a commercial traveler—hung the picture which he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put into a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady, with a fur cap on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished!