To understand a work by Kafka, only a comparison with another work by Kafka will suffice. To make sense of what is most original and distinct in The Castle, what makes it the most thoroughly realized expression of Kafka’s imagination, even though it is incomplete, it is necessary to compare it to The Trial. Both works are about characters who are not so much in … Continue reading 240. (Franz Kafka)
I was alerted to Irad Kimhi’s Thinking and Being before its publication by way of a note in Sebastian Rödl’s Self-Consciousness and Objectivity, and though there are other ways of reading Kimhi’s short work—not least as an ambition to meet Parmenides’ challenge of how it is possible to think what is not, by restoring our understanding of Aristotle, Plato, and Wittgenstein—I found myself appreciating it … Continue reading 237. (Irad Kimhi)
What is the appeal of criticism, of reading or doing it? It must rest in beguilement at judgment itself, and at the purity of judgment, as a form of thought, which art and literature represents, and which the literature of modernity, in Flaubert, in Proust, in Kafka, has fetishized, over-determined, and ironized to a remarkable extent. The possibility of judgment itself has become the occasion … Continue reading 236. (Christopher Ricks)
The resemblance between Kafka’s The Castle and the Alice books is obvious. But the differences are more telling. In Kafka’s novel, there is neither madness nor absurdity. Absurdity follows from a lack of reasons (reasons in the Alice books are offered, but they are arbitrary, temporary, nonce); madness from a lack of rationality. In The Castle, K. encounters a surfeit of both reasons and rationality. Everyone he encounters … Continue reading 235. (Franz Kafka)
The poetry of Samuel Menashe is illuminated by the thought that, even the smallest lyric poem, when successful, will be like the focal point on an hour glass, through which so much experience and time passes, an entire future and entire past opening out on either side of it. It will also be a reminder that history might not come to a reader direct, … Continue reading 233. (Samuel Menashe)
Although it would be wrong to read John Berryman’s Dream Songs as a poem about the madness of a nation, since they are so achingly about the madness of a man, it is also to do them wrong as poems not to see that Berryman knows that to communicate madness and isolation as he does ought, if it is to feel fully realized, fully a … Continue reading 232. (John Berryman)
Is it possible to grow into a critic of literature? Immediately, the question ought to be revised: is it possible to grow into admiring another reader of literature? The answer is unequivocally yes, just as it is possible to grow into admiration for an author of imaginative literature. The difference lies in the means available for growth: we can learn to appreciate an author partly … Continue reading 229. (Erich Auerbach)
