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David Foster Wallace's talk "Laughing with Kafka" is very insightful as well. https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-07-0059612.pdf https
by hprotagonist 8y ago
David Foster Wallace's talk "Laughing with Kafka" is very insightful as well.
https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-07-0059612.pdf https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-...
For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with
college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to
see that Kafka is funny ... Nor to appreciate the way
funniness is bound up with the extraordinary power of his
stories. Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes
have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists
sometimes call "exformation," which is a certain quantity of
vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in
such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative
connections within the recipient.
This is probably why the
effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and
percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve. It's not for
nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as "a hatchet with which
we chop at the frozen seas inside us." Nor is it an accident
that the technical achievement of great short stories is often
called "compression"-for both the pressure and the release are
already inside the reader.
What Kafka seems able to do better
than just about anyone else is to orchestrate the pressure's
increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise
instant it is released.
- newman8r 8y agoGood article. I've only read The Metamorphosis but I think this makes sense. Looking back on it, the 'three lodgers' in that book present a funny, absurd scenario. I prefer reading relatively short and simple classics like The Metamorphosis - if anyone has some recommendations I'd be interested.
- hprotagonist 8y agopenal colony, a hunger artist.
- newman8r 8y agoThose sound good here's a link I found to 'In the Penal Colony' for anyone interested http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~raha/793CA_web/PenalColony.pdf http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~raha/793CA_web/PenalColony.pdf
- galaxyLogic 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika_(novel)
- mturmon 8y agoMy very favorite extremely short piece of Kafka's writing - just one magical sentence: http://franzkafkastories.com/shortStories.php?story_id=kafka_the_wish_to_be_a_red_indian http://franzkafkastories.com/shortStories.php?story_id=kafka... The other short anecdotal pieces linked in that page are also wonderful. Here's one: http://franzkafkastories.com/shortStories.php?story_id=kafka_the_street_window http://franzkafkastories.com/shortStories.php?story_id=kafka... And another, which (to me) is one of many counter-examples to the "Laughing With Kafka" notion: http://franzkafkastories.com/shortStories.php?story_id=kafka_resolutions http://franzkafkastories.com/shortStories.php?story_id=kafka... That is, the final piece above is truly despairing in a way that DFW, perhaps, could identify with.
- david927 8y agoWow! I've never seen these works and they're brilliant. You've made my day! And, yes, the final piece is perfectly what DFW was talking about.
- nyolfen 8y agothis reminds me of an onion video, from back when they had a video team that was much funnier: Prague's Kafka International Named Most Alienating Airport https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ
- jessup 8y ago"Before the Law" is an example of a Kafka story that reads like a joke / one of the jokes that Kafka wrote: http://www.kafka-online.info/before-the-law.html http://www.kafka-online.info/before-the-law.html