Bugging Out
Born in Prague in 1883, Franz Kafka is one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Yet almost all his fiction was published posthumously, after his early death from tuberculosis in 1924. As an educated, German-speaking lawyer, Kafka was a member of Prague’s middle class, but he was also very much an outsider, a Jew living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (after 1918, Czechoslovakia). Emperor Franz Joseph I had extended full citizenship to Jews fifteen years before Kafka’s birth, but antisemitism remained rife—and found terrible expression after Hitler occupied Prague fifteen years after Kafka’s death.
Kafka’s short novel The Metamorphosis presents middle-class existence as precarious—and throws into question whether family can stand as a bulwark against the vagaries of fortune.
Reading: Kafka, The Metamorphosis trans Susan Bernofsky.
Optional Reading: our translator, Susan Bernofsky, talks about the challenges of rendering Kafka’s story in English in an article published in the New Yorker: link. (This may be present in your copy of the book, as an “Afterword.”)
Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:
- Given that “anomie” is defined as the loss of social norms, point to a particular moment in Kafka’s story and explain how it challenges or violates the reader’s normative expectations.
- Gregor Samsa is often characterized as an “antihero.” Without looking up that term, point to something specific that Samsa does (or fails to do) that strikes you as unheroic.
- There are lots of weird moments in this story: point to one and comment briefly.