Kafka's Creatures

Catalog description

Franz Kafka's writings are replete with bestial beings, talking animals, hybrid creatures and other non-human or quasi-human entities. Examining the monstrous or grotesque bodies his work offers up for display, this course, taught in German, will interrogate how Kafka's short stories and novellas construct and call into question the very category of the anthropological. Examining the tradition out of which this creaturely writing grows (reading Kafka's animal fables beside Aesop's, for instance) and its legacy in literature, art and cinema (comparing, for example, Kafka's Metamorphosis with David Cronenberg's The Fly), we will also attend to how these incongruous critters and bodies-in-becoming reflect on Kafka's minoritarian experience as a German-speaking Jew in Habsburg-Era Prague and are in turn reflected in uncanny and ever-evolving aesthetic forms.