[HN Gopher] Franz Kafka's Dissenting Bodies
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Franz Kafka's Dissenting Bodies
Author : prismatic
Score : 18 points
Date : 2022-10-08 21:27 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.prospectmagazine.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.prospectmagazine.co.uk)
| gnulinux wrote:
| I'm not sure if this question is off-topic and if so I'm sorry,
| but I was really curious so I couldn't help but ask. I observe
| that articles about Franz Kafka end up in HN front page
| relatively frequently. Personally, I'm a huge fan of Kafka, I
| read all his novels (and some of his short stories), he's one of
| my favorite author, so I have no problem with this. But I can't
| help but wonder whether there is some kind of correlation between
| being an HN reader and liking Kafka's works, or whether people
| just see the word "Kafka" and somehow think it's related to
| Apache Kafka [1] and upvote. Curious about what others think
| about this.
|
| When it comes to the OP article:
|
| > Vladimir Nabokov was having none of it: in his teaching copy of
| the novella, he drew a sketch of a common beetle.
|
| I'm curious why Nabokov thought this would be accurate. The work
| itself intentionally doesn't mention what kind of "vermin" Gregor
| Samsa is..
|
| [1] https://kafka.apache.org/
| dnc wrote:
| > I read all his novels (and some of his short stories), he's
| one of my favorite authors
|
| That makes at least two of us. :) But, I suspect there are
| quite a few more HN readers who like Kafka's works and
| literature in general (the first is arguably very correlated to
| the other), judging from how often literature related articles
| appear on the HN front page. Often, when that is the case I
| also can't help but wonder the same about the correlation
| between being a fiction and HN reader.
| blockwriter wrote:
| To me, Kafka's work is particularly axiomatic. It has an
| internal logic and tends toward involution. I could see how
| this would appeal to technically minded people, whereas
| Dickens, or Austen, authors whose work tends to be
| discursive, might seem boring or without basis.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| What do axiomatic and involution mean in this (presumably
| literary) context?
| blockwriter wrote:
| They are axiomatic in that Kafka's worlds are frequently
| built upon a set of conditions, and the development is
| contingent upon how these conditions interact, whereas
| other writers often depart from pre-established rules
| because they become cumbersome, or they introduce new
| ones as a matter of convenience. Kafka, in a story like
| The Burrow, seems to be in search of a complete system
| that becomes fully expressed by virtue of an exhaustive
| exploration of its potential, in accordance with its own
| stipulations. It develops like a drop of ink in a glass
| of water. Due also to a desire not to retread ground, as
| he criticizes Dickens of doing, this may be why much of
| his work went unfinished.
|
| By involution, I mean that Kafka's stories, to a greater
| extent than just about any other writer, forestall the
| influence of "outside" forces. His worlds do not rely on
| historical context, and his characters hardly, if ever,
| propose a new and narrative-changing idea from whole
| clothe, although the conclusions they draw are often
| strange, novel, and sudden. Kafka's land surveyor in The
| Castle is always circling back to the fact that he is a
| land surveyor as the basis for his behavior, even though
| he never actually fulfills or comes close to fulfilling
| his vocational imperative.
|
| I always recommend Reiner Stach's three volume biography
| of Kafka to people. The author does a great job of
| looking into the literature as much as he looks into the
| life.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > But I can't help but wonder whether there is some kind of
| correlation between being an HN reader and liking Kafka's
| works, or whether people just see the word "Kafka" and somehow
| think it's related to Apache Kafka [1] and upvote. Curious
| about what others think about this.
|
| Kafka isn't obscure. Everyone has heard of Kafkaesque.
|
| Why ask whether people just blindly/ignorantly upvote?
| uwagar wrote:
| i cant begin to tell you how pissed off i am about the name of
| kafka used for a software project. is it just me?
| anothernewdude wrote:
| It'd be a more appropriate name for Nifi to be honest.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| I think the kind of dystopia that Kafka wrote about is part of
| the zeitgeist.
| uwagar wrote:
| anyone feel an eastern european oppressive brown-gray stone
| communist vibe reading kafka?
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