Franz Kafka

3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924

Why read Kafka?

Kafka and Blake: Innocents in a world of Experience

• Family: Infant Sorrow
• Love/sex: The Sick Rose
• Ethics and duty: The Clod and the Pebble
• Civilization: London
• God: The Tyger

Setting

Prague, Czechoslovakia

• The Castle
• The Jewish Cemetery
• St Nicholas Church interior

Early 20th century--World War I

Cultural influences

• Darwin: Origin of Species
• Nietzsche: Genealogy of Morals; Beyond Good and Evil
• Freud: Interpretation of Dreams, The Ego and the Id
• Modernism in literature

Connections to previous works: Blake, Wordsworth, Thoreau, Beethoven, Tolstoy, Douglass, Balzac

Biography

• Day job--night writer
• Family--Letter to my Father
• Jewish identity
• Love and sex life
• Illness

The Metamorphosis

"The Country Doctor"

• Anime version by Koji Yamamura: Part 1, Part II, Part III
• "A Theology of Illness"

"The Penal Colony"