Overview
- Recasts Kafka’s works to reveal a deeper political purpose behind the appearances of nonhuman forms
- Bridges recent theories included within the “nonhuman” turn with close literary analyses of Kafka's original German
- Touches upon a wide portion of Kafka’s well known work including The Trial, The Metamorphosis, and his short stories, as well as works such as Amerika that have received less attention
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature (PSAAL)
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Table of contents (5 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book is a compact study of Kafka’s inimitable literary style, animals, and ecological thought—his nonhuman form—that proceeds through original close readings of Kafka’s oeuvre. With select engagements of Adorno, Derrida, and the literary heritage from Romanticism to Dickens that influenced Kafka, Ted Geier discusses Kafka’s literary, “nonhuman” form and the way it unsettles the notion of a natural and simple existence that society and culture impose, including the boundaries between human and animal. Through careful attention to the formal predicaments of Kafka’s works and engaging with Kafka’s original legal and social thought in his novels and short stories, this book renders Kafka’s sometimes impossibly enigmatic work legible at the level of its expression, bringing surprising shape to his work and redefining what scholars and readers have understood as the “Kafkaesque”.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Ted Geier is currently Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University and the founder of the Interdisciplinary Animal Studies Group at the University of California, Davis, USA. He has taught comparative literature, cinema, Romanticism, and American cultural studies at San Francisco State University, Davis, and Rice. He is the author of articles and book chapters on animals and ecology in the works of Italo Calvino, recent world literature, and British literature of the long nineteenth century, in addition to ecocinema, especially in the work of Terrence Malick.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Kafka’s Nonhuman Form
Book Subtitle: Troubling the Boundaries of the Kafkaesque
Authors: Ted Geier
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40394-6
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-40393-9Published: 31 August 2016
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-82092-7Published: 14 June 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-40394-6Published: 23 August 2016
Series ISSN: 2634-6338
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6346
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 121
Number of Illustrations: 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: European Literature, Literary Theory, Twentieth-Century Literature