Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

Kafka's Castle and The Critical Imagination (Literary Criticism in Perspective)

Stephen D. Dowden

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Kafka's final, unfinished novel The Castle remains one of the most celebrated yet most stubbornly uninterpretable masterpieces of modernist fiction. Consequently it has been a lightning rod for theories and methods of literary criticism. In this chronological study of its fate at the hands of academic and non-academic critics, S. D. Dowden lays emphasis on the acts of critical imagination that have shaped our image and understanding of Kafka and his novel. He explores the historical and cultural contingencies of criticism: from the Weimar Era of Max Brod and Walter Benjamin to Lionel Trilling's Cold War to the postmodern moment of multiculturalism and its turn to "cultural studies." Dowden shows how and why The Castle became a contested site in the imaginative life of each succeeding generation of criticism. In addition, he accounts for those moments at which Kafka's novel escapes, or at least attempts to escape, the gravitational pull of historically anchored understanding. Forthright in its prose, Dowden's is a book essential for anyone, casual reader or professional critic, who hopes to grasp the peculiar difficulties and challenges of Kafka's prose in general and of The Castle in particular.

Language: English

Pages: 176

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Camden House (NY)

Release: May 25, 1995

ISBN: 1571130047

ISBN 13: 9781571130044

Kafka's Castle and The Critical Imagination (Literary Criticism in Perspective)

Stephen D. Dowden

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Kafka's final, unfinished novel The Castle remains one of the most celebrated yet most stubbornly uninterpretable masterpieces of modernist fiction. Consequently it has been a lightning rod for theories and methods of literary criticism. In this chronological study of its fate at the hands of academic and non-academic critics, S. D. Dowden lays emphasis on the acts of critical imagination that have shaped our image and understanding of Kafka and his novel. He explores the historical and cultural contingencies of criticism: from the Weimar Era of Max Brod and Walter Benjamin to Lionel Trilling's Cold War to the postmodern moment of multiculturalism and its turn to "cultural studies." Dowden shows how and why The Castle became a contested site in the imaginative life of each succeeding generation of criticism. In addition, he accounts for those moments at which Kafka's novel escapes, or at least attempts to escape, the gravitational pull of historically anchored understanding. Forthright in its prose, Dowden's is a book essential for anyone, casual reader or professional critic, who hopes to grasp the peculiar difficulties and challenges of Kafka's prose in general and of The Castle in particular.

Language: English

Pages: 176

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Camden House (NY)

Release: May 25, 1995

ISBN: 1571130047

ISBN 13: 9781571130044

More books from Stephen D. Dowden

A Companion to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain

3.7/5 ( ratings)

Understanding Thomas Bernhard

3.2/5 ( ratings)

Sympathy for the Abyss: A Study in the Novel of German Modernism: Kafka, Broch, Musil, and Thomas Mann

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Hermann Broch: Literature, Philosophy, Politics: The Yale Broch Symposium, 1986

Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives

Germany's Other Modernism: The Jena Paradigm, 1900-1914 (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture, 234)

Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives (New Directions in German Studies Book 30)

Tragedy and the Tragic in German Literature, Art, and Thought

German Literature, Jewish Critics: The Brandeis Symposium

Nexus 6: Essays in German Jewish Studies (Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies, 6)

Rate this book!

Write a review?