[HN Gopher] The Diaries of Franz Kafka
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The Diaries of Franz Kafka
Author : lermontov
Score : 37 points
Date : 2023-05-30 05:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.firstthings.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.firstthings.com)
| xhevahir wrote:
| I read an article a few years ago that convinced me that Kafka's
| peculiar quality--the famous "Kafkaesque"--isn't due to his
| experience with Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy, or his being a
| German-speaking Jew surrounded by Czech-speaking Catholics, or
| any of the other reasons commonly suggested--it was mostly his
| autism. (The author was an obscure, independent scholar named
| Jerry Stuger, although I don't remember the title.)
| beezlewax wrote:
| Bit weird to posthumously diagnose someone with autism. At best
| it would be an interesting hypothesis.
| xhevahir wrote:
| Yes, he's dead. So, for that matter, are Newton and Einstein,
| whose autistic traits have been discerned by none other than
| the world's leading expert in the field:
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3676-einstein-and-
| new... .
| snotrockets wrote:
| A person can have autistic traits without being autistic.
| The diagnosis is how the symptoms affect the person as a
| whole, and if "Symptoms cause clinically significant
| impairment in social, occupational, or other important
| areas of current functioning" (which is why it's so hard to
| diagnose adults, because many undiagnosed autistics learned
| to mask their difficulties).
|
| That's why you don't diagnose based on rumors or historical
| records. It's unscientific and unethical. And as Glenn
| Elliott is quoted in the link you shared: "One can imagine
| geniuses who are socially inept and yet not remotely
| autistic, impatience with the intellectual slowness of
| others, narcissism and passion for one's mission in life
| might combine to make such an individuals isolative and
| difficult."
|
| Baron-Cohen himself is very much proponent of Asperger
| abelist view of autism: an ouccrance of some super-
| intelligent boys with social deficiencies. That definition
| isn't much accepted nowdays, when we know autism doesn't
| necessarily cohabitates with better cofnitive abilities, or
| being AMAB.
| xhevahir wrote:
| I'll bite. Why is it unethical? As for its being
| unscientific, I'm also curious as to what standards of
| evidence people think are appropriate to biographical and
| literary-historical matters.
| snotrockets wrote:
| Not weird, just unethical and unscientific.
| vcg3rd wrote:
| Another First Things reader on HN. Nice!
| liquid153 wrote:
| Not Apache Kafka RTFM
| kieselguhr_kid wrote:
| > In his introduction to an edition of Metamorphosis, the
| novelist Adam Thirlwell suggests that we have misunderstood Kafka
| much as Magarshack said we had misunderstood Chekhov, and that
| Kafka is much more playful than we have hitherto given him credit
| for.
|
| When I was 17, I read Kafka for the first time and was put off by
| what I saw as the dour and oppressive atmosphere. I had the same
| insight as Thirlwell when I reread him ~10 years later: Kafka's
| works have a sort of deadpan and absurdist humor to them and
| shouldn't be treated as seriously as they often are. I wonder how
| much of that humor is lost in translation.
| quercusa wrote:
| _The translation must have been a labor both of love and of
| Hercules. There are 1,403 endnotes for 564 pages of text--that is
| to say, 2.4836252 endnotes per page--to inform us of every
| literary allusion, and every geographical location mentioned,
| down to the number of a street: an admirable thoroughness that I
| should be tempted to call Teutonic if stereotyping were not so
| frowned upon these days._
| ftxbro wrote:
| > "an admirable thoroughness that I should be tempted to call
| Teutonic if stereotyping were not so frowned upon these days."
|
| weaponized teutism
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