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Understanding Franz Kafka by Allen Thiher (review)
Ist Teil von
German Studies Review, 2019-02, Vol.42 (1), p.162-164
Ort / Verlag
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2019
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Project MUSE
Beschreibungen/Notizen
Underlaid by a "judicious literary assessment of the major works in the most compact, readable form," the series is impelled by an obliging purpose in that it ultimately hopes to "increase knowledge and understanding of European and Latin American cultures and will serve to make the literature of those cultures more accessible" (ix). Interestingly, apart from the indication of new productions and in different generic forms, Thiher does not lend a distinguishing characteristic to the second and third periods, but he does suggest that Kafka's debilitating condition and waxing sense of mortality expedited and made increasingly urgent literary creation—even as the latter constantly doubted his skill in so doing. [...]a disclosure would then enable the reader to more clearly see that, far from being a straightforward task to be taken for granted, literary "understanding" (of Kafka, especially) means making hermeneutical assumptions and interpretive decisions, selected from a range of options and ultimately chosen based on criteria of justice to the text, on the one hand, and which lens opens up the greatest unplumbed depths of meaning, on the other.