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...
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 ...
Complex Pleasure deals with questions of literary feeling in eight major German writers--Lessing, Kant, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Musil, Kafka, Trakl, and Benjamin. On the basis of close readings of these authors Stanley Corngold makes vivid the following ideas: that where there is literature there is complex pleasure; that this pleasure is complex because it involves the impression of a disclosure; that this thought is foremost in the minds of a number of canonical writers; that important literary works in the German tradition--fiction, poetry, critique--can be illuminated through their...
Complex Pleasure deals with questions of literary feeling in eight major German writers--Lessing, Kant, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Musil, Kafka, Tra...
Much recent critical theory has dismissed or failed to take seriously the question of the self. French theorists--such as Derrida, Barthes, Benveniste, Foucault, Lacan, and Levi-Strauss--have in various ways proclaimed the death of the subject, often turning to German intellectual tradition to authorize their views. Stanley Corngold's heralded book, "The Fate of the Self," published for the first time in paperback with a spirited new preface, appears at a time when the relationship between the self and literature is a matter of renewed concern. Originally published in 1986 (Columbia...
Much recent critical theory has dismissed or failed to take seriously the question of the self. French theorists--such as Derrida, Barthes, Benveniste...
"Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine" adds an original critical framework to the work begun by Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner in their monumental collection "Franz Kafka: The Office Writings" (2008). It is widely acknowledged that Kafka s daytime occupation as a specialist in industrial accident insurance contributed in a significant way to his fiction. Corngold and Wagner frame Kafka s writings as cultural events, each work reflecting the economic and cultural discourses of his epoch. In pursuing Kafka s avowed interest in the theory and practice of insurance, the authors view the...
"Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine" adds an original critical framework to the work begun by Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner in their monumenta...
Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Stanley Corngold Featuring essays by Philip Roth, W. H Auden, and Walter Benjamin "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Franz Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially...
Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Stanley Corngold Featuring essays by Philip Roth, W. H Auden, and Walter Benjamin
Franz Kafka's literary career began in the first decade of the twentieth century and produced some of the most fascinating and influential works in all of modern European literature. Now, a hundred years later, the concerns of a new century call for a look at the challenges facing Kafka scholarship in the decades ahead: What more can we hope to learn about the context in which Kafka wrote? How does understanding that context affect how we read his stories? What are the consequences of new critical editions that offer unprecedented access to Kafka's works in manuscript form? How does our view...
Franz Kafka's literary career began in the first decade of the twentieth century and produced some of the most fascinating and influential works in al...
Franz Kafka: The Office Writings brings together, for the first time in English, Kafka's most interesting professional writings, composed during his years as a high-ranking lawyer with the largest Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in the Czech Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is commonly recognized as the greatest German prose writer of the twentieth century. It is less well known that he had an established legal career. Kafka's briefs reveal him to be a canny bureaucrat, sharp litigator, and innovative thinker on the social, political, and...
Franz Kafka: The Office Writings brings together, for the first time in English, Kafka's most interesting professional writings, compos...
In Stanley Corngold's view, the themes and strategies of Kafka's fiction are generated by a tension between his concern for writing and his growing sense of its arbitrary character. Analyzing Kafka's work in light of "the necessity of form," which is also a merely formal necessity, Corngold uncovers the fundamental paradox of Kafka's art and...
In Stanley Corngold's view, the themes and strategies of Kafka's fiction are generated by a tension between his concern for writing and his growing se...
