Table of Contents

Introduction
Running Texts, Stunning Drafts
"Torturing the Gordian Knot": Kafka and Metaphor Revisited
Nietzsche and Kafka: The Dionysian Connection
What Kafka Learned from Flaubert: Absent-Minded Window-Gazing and The Judgment
Kafka's Racial Melancholy: "A Report to an Academy"
Strange Loops and Absent Center in The Castle
Proxies in Kafka: Koncipist FK and Prokurist Joseph K
Kafka, Goffman, and the Total Institution
Kafka in Virilio's Teletopical City
Kafka's Visual Method: The Gaze, the Cinematic, and Intermedial
"Samsa war Reisender": Trains, Trauma, and the Unreadable Body
The Comfort of Strangeness: Correlating the Kafkaesque and the Kafkan in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled
Kafka's Journey into the Future: Crossing Borders into Israeli/Palestinian Worlds
Kafka and Italy: A New Perspective on the Italian Literary Landscape
Works Cited-Full Bibliography

About the Author

Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Arlington

Reviews

The essays in this volume are all worth reading, . . . well written and cogently argued. . . . Often they are provocative, sometimes opening up new avenues into parts of Kafka's oeuvre . . . sometimes, just as productively, re-exploring old ones. . . . [T]aken together the essays do in fact set out a fairly coherent agenda for Kafka Studies over the coming years and even decades.
*MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW*

[P]roves that there is no end in sight to Kafka scholarship. . . . With its fine scholarship, comprehensive bibliography, [and] detailed index, [this collection] excels in every respect: the book is user friendly and at the same time an important addition to Kafka research.
*JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN STUDIES*

The best moments in Kafka for the Twenty-First Century are those which return us to the detail of Kafka's own writing, often of fragmentary and little-regarded bits and pieces, which immediately reminds us why we read Kafka in the first place.
*TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT*