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Franz Kafka (1883-1924) "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us...We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
A German Jew in Prague A frustrated writer whose father forced him into a career as a bank clerk Published very little in his lifetime Left orders for all of his manuscripts to be destroyed when he died His executordisobeyed his orders and Kafka became famous after his death Kafka’s Life
A situation having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality • Your mother, who is making you breakfast as you sit at the kitchen table, has suddenly turned into a zombie who continues to flip pancakes and whistle a cheerful tune. • When someone is at the mercy of a collective logic that he or she does not understand • While waiting for a train in 30th Street Station, all of the travelers around you become a flash mob singing Call Me Maybe. OR • You are interrogated by a group of people who believe you have done something horrible but you have no idea what they are talking about. • A situation or work of artthat takes something very familiar and distorts it into something somewhat unsettlingand disorienting; a surreal experience “Kafkaesque”
An artistic movement that focused on impossibilities and contradictions suggested by the subconscious reality of the dream world Relied on the unconscious for inspiration in art, believing that art as access to the unconscious was more "real" or "true" than rationalist art works. Art of Metaphors; communicating deeper thoughts by looking at the metaphoric significance of the work Surrealism
The most significant philosophical movement of the 20thcentury The belief that reality/life on Earth is basically Godless and meaningless, so meaning must be created through individual actions and choices. Filled with the themes and archetypes of alienation, physical and psychological brutality Existentialism
In the two decades which fell between the two world wars, European intellectuals lived in a state of profound shock. It was a nightmare world . Many began to believe that man was isolated and constantly subjected to unknown and terrifying forces -- forces without direction, forces without control. But why? If you were unlucky enough to have lived between 1914 and 1945, you may have had the following experience. You might have: • watched the slaughter at Verdun or the Somme or the Marne • witnessed firsthand the Bolshevik terror in Russia • observed the black-shirted and brown-shirted hysteria in Italy and Germany • been one of the starving workers during the Depression of 1929-1935 • watched your family fall victim to Stalin's purges • fought in the Spanish Civil War • ended up in a Nazi concentration camp, witnessing loved ones being herded into “showers” • helped to destroy whole cities like Coventry or Dresden or Nagasaki Regardless of where you were at the time, you could not help but notice that the world had become one of violence and uncertainty. It was a world of terror, irrationality, and inhumanity All of this was colored by the increased feeling that God was dead. All this was the background and experience of a new generation of thinkers who began to call themselves existentialists.
Pre-reading Question Think of a situation from a dream you have had that seemed incredibly real at the time but that could not actually happen in real life. What happened in the dream? What details made it seem real? What feelings did you have while dreaming? Afterward? (at the very least, two complete paragraphs, attach additional lines if needed).
