Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Kafka’s Works by Year of First Appearance, With Date of First English Translation
- Abbreviations of Kafka’s Works
- Introduction: Kafka Begins
- Critical Editions I: The 1994 Paperback Edition
- Critical Editions II: Will the Real Franz Kafka Please Stand Up?
- Beyond Self-Assertion: A Life of Reading Kafka
- Kafka before Kafka: The Early Stories
- Tradition and Betrayal in “Das Urteil”
- Kafka as Anti-Christian: “Das Urteil,” “Die Verwandlung,” and the Aphorisms
- Kafka’s Aesthetics: A Primer: From the Fragments to the Novels
- Medial Allusions at the Outset of Der Proceß; or, res in media
- Kafka’s Circus Turns: “Auf der Galerie” and “Erstes Leid”
- Kafka and Postcolonial Critique: Der Verschollene, “In der Strafkolonie,” “Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer”
- Disjunctive Signs: Semiotics, Aesthetics, and Failed Mediation in “In der Strafkolonie”
- Hunting Kafka Out of Season: Enigmatics in the Short Fictions
- A Dream of Jewishness Denied: Kafka’s Tumor and “Ein Landarzt”
- Surveying The Castle: Kafka’s Colonial Visions
- Making Everything “a little uncanny”: Kafka’s Deletions in the Manuscript of Das Schloß and What They Can Tell Us About His Writing Process
- Kafka Imagines His Readers: The Rhetoric of “Josefine die Sängerin” and “Der Bau”
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Critical Editions II: Will the Real Franz Kafka Please Stand Up?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Kafka’s Works by Year of First Appearance, With Date of First English Translation
- Abbreviations of Kafka’s Works
- Introduction: Kafka Begins
- Critical Editions I: The 1994 Paperback Edition
- Critical Editions II: Will the Real Franz Kafka Please Stand Up?
- Beyond Self-Assertion: A Life of Reading Kafka
- Kafka before Kafka: The Early Stories
- Tradition and Betrayal in “Das Urteil”
- Kafka as Anti-Christian: “Das Urteil,” “Die Verwandlung,” and the Aphorisms
- Kafka’s Aesthetics: A Primer: From the Fragments to the Novels
- Medial Allusions at the Outset of Der Proceß; or, res in media
- Kafka’s Circus Turns: “Auf der Galerie” and “Erstes Leid”
- Kafka and Postcolonial Critique: Der Verschollene, “In der Strafkolonie,” “Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer”
- Disjunctive Signs: Semiotics, Aesthetics, and Failed Mediation in “In der Strafkolonie”
- Hunting Kafka Out of Season: Enigmatics in the Short Fictions
- A Dream of Jewishness Denied: Kafka’s Tumor and “Ein Landarzt”
- Surveying The Castle: Kafka’s Colonial Visions
- Making Everything “a little uncanny”: Kafka’s Deletions in the Manuscript of Das Schloß and What They Can Tell Us About His Writing Process
- Kafka Imagines His Readers: The Rhetoric of “Josefine die Sängerin” and “Der Bau”
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
IT WILL BE HELPFUL, as a preliminary step in considering the various texts of Kafka currently available, to divide his writings into two principal categories: (A) works published by Kafka during his lifetime; and (B) everything else he wrote.
The total contents of (A) is surprisingly sparse, comprising all in all under five hundred pages printed in large format. It includes the following:
(1) Seven publications in book form
(a) Betrachtung (a collection of eighteen short pieces)
(b) Das Urteil
(c) Der Heizer (part of a manuscript fragment Brod would later publish as the novel Amerika)
(d) Die Verwandlung
(e) In der Strafkolonie
(f) Ein Landarzt (fourteen stories, including the one from which the volume takes its title)
(g) Ein Hungerkünstler (four stories, including the one named in the title)
(2) Ten items, all relatively brief, that appeared in various periodicals (among these are such things as the “Gespräch mit dem Beter” and the “Gespräch mit dem Betrunkenen,” excepted from larger projects that Kafka never completed to his satisfaction).
The works belonging to this (A) category are relatively unproblematic and require little discussion, since we can safely assume that Kafka meant these works to be read in the form in which he published them. Like the works of any important and widely studied writer, these texts can be compared to the manuscript materials available to us, and we can make note of changes and occasional errors. In some cases, the materials from Kafka’s literary estate offer a larger context in which these published texts can perhaps be better understood. But the texts as published set a safe norm against which we can read the variants revealed by study of archival materials and can reasonably be taken to represent a firm authorial intention. A thoroughly reliable critical edition is available in Fischer Verlag’s two-volume Drucke zu Lebzeiten.
The (B) category presents a very different picture, though some of it presents fewer problems than the rest.
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- Information
- A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka , pp. 27 - 32Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2002
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