Kafka, 1883-1924

by Wagenbach, Klaus; Osers, Ewald

• ISBN13: 9780674011380
• ISBN10: 0674011384
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-05-30
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

In Kafka's writing, Albert Camus tells us, we travel "to the limits of human thought." And in this book, the world's leading Kafka authority conducts us to the deepest reaches of Kafka's own troubled psyche, to reveal the inner workings of the man who gave his name to a central facet of modern experience, the Kafkaesque. Klaus Wagenbach, who wrote the first major critical biography of Kafka, draws upon a wealth of new and recent information to produce a concise but finely nuanced portrait of the author, an ideal introduction to this quintessential figure of modernity. With extensive reference to Kafka's extraordinary letters and diaries, Wagenbach shows us the author of Metamorphosis and The Trial perpetually caught between the irresistible attractions of the world and his ruthless desire for solitude and isolation. It was this tension, Wagenbach tells us, that gave Kafka's writing its uncanny quality and that haunted his intense, unresolved relationships with women. And it was in this tension that both his misery and mastery inhered, making his one of the most painfully powerful voices of the experience of the twentieth century.

Author Biography

Klaus Wagenbach is a publisher and renowned Kafka expert. He has written six books on Kafka Ritchie Robertson is a Professor at St John's College, Oxford

Table of Contents

Introduction	vii
Ritchie Robertson
Fame -- too late for the author	1	(3)
The son of a shopkeeper, lost in Prague	4	(17)
What does a boy learn at an Imperial and Royal Secondary School?	21	(17)
University, society and language in the capital of Bohemia	38	(20)
`Description of a Struggle': the insurance official, his job, his plans and his journeys	58	(20)
The only way to write!	78	(20)
Life or literature? Kafka's engagements and The Trial	98	(18)
The wound	116	(15)
A naked man among the clothed	131	(18)
Notes	149	(5)
Map of Prague	154	(2)
Chronology	156	(10)
List of Works	166	(2)
Further Reading	168	(2)
Picture Sources	170	(1)
Index	171