Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung (1915)

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

Biography

• Born in Prague (Austro-Hungarian Monarchy)

• Czech-Jewish origin

• German-speaking Czech Jew

Hermann Kafka, Julie Löwy

Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867-1918)

Biography

• Studied Law (doctorate 1906)

• Worked in insurance

• Wrote literary texts in spare time

• Literary circle in Prague (Max Brod, Felix Weltsch)

Biography

• Engaged several times

• Never married

• Tuberculosis diagnosed, 1917

• Death near Vienna, 1924

Kafka as writer

• Great name of literary modernism (Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf)

• Short stories, novellas, novels

• Experimental prose style (“personales Erzählen”)

Kafka as writer

• Tendency towards the fantastic / supernatural

• Motif of metamorphosis: fairytale motif

• Human / animal theme

• Strangeness, alienation, grotesquerie

Kafka as writer

• Relatively unknown during his lifetime

• Posthumous fame (Max Brod; American and English reception)

• “kafkaesque”

Themes

• Crisis of (masculine) identity in modernity

• The passing of religion / tradition

• The search for meaning

• The body / sexuality

Themes

• Critique of capitalism

• Critique of bourgeois family

• Critique of patriarchal power structures

Oedpius complex

• Power struggle between father and son

– Das Urteil (1912)

– Die Verwandlung (1915)

– Brief an den Vater (1919)

Hermann Kafka (1852-1931)

Sigmund Freud: Oedipus complex

• Desire for the parent of the opposite sex (son for mother)

• Universal developmental stage for all male children (ages 3-6)

• Successful resolution of complex results in identification with same-sex parent

Oedipus complex

• If unresolved – neurosis, “arrested development”

• Fixation on the father

• Ongoing power struggle

Die Verwandlung

• Father / son (oedipal) struggle?

• Father fixation? Mother fixation? Sister fixation?

• Son as eternal loser in the oedipal conflict?

Masochism

• Gregor as masochist?

• Masochism as sign of the son’s defeat in oedipal conflict?

• Family – esp. sister – as sadists?