Freedom and confinement in modernity
Subtitle: Kafka's cages
By: edited by A. Kiarina Kordela and Dimitris Vardoulakis
Edition: 1st ed.
Series: Studies in European culture and history; Studies in European culture and history
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 244
ISBN-13: 9780230113428
Subjects: Self (Philosophy) in literature; Criticism and interpretation; Liberty in literature; Imprisonment in literature
Description: Franz Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in modernity. Rather, it allows Kafka to perform a critique of a modernity that first posits a clear-cut opposition between confinement and freedom, and then sets up freedom as an ideal which, conceived in such absolute terms, is by definition unattainable.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Special views on Kafka's cages / Stanley Corngold; title: Delusions of agency: Kafka, imprisonment, and modern victimhood / Chris Fleming and John O'Carroll; title: Kafka and Derrida before the laws / Howard Caygill; title: Kafka's cage / John Mowitt; title: "The fall is the proof of our freedom": mediated freedom in Kafka / Dimitris Vardoulakis; title: Workforce without possessions: Kafka, "social justice," and the word religion / Peter Fenves; title: Kafkaesque: (secular) Kabbalah and allegory / A. Kiarina Kordela; title: The ethics and beauty of the trial: Kafka's circumscription of failure / Ross Shields; title: Kafka's fatal performatives: between "bad conscience" and betrayed vulnerability / Karyn Ball; title: How is the trapeze possible? / Christophe Bident; title: With impunity / Henry Sussman.