Does attention to detail make one a thinker?  Isn’t it the attention to the whole?  Robert Walser’s portrayal of the philosopher – in his prose piece “The Philosopher” – makes him into a person who is obsessed with small things.   He is, as Walser says, like a child who is “groping for small things.” […]

Unlike many readers who take much of Franz Kafka’s fiction as tragic or dark (think, for instance, of “The Metamorphosis,” “The Penal Colony,” or The Trial), Philip Roth thought of Kafka as a “sit down comic.”   From Max Brod we learn that Kafka used to laugh when he read his work publically, and, of course, the […]

  Kafka never went to America. But he, like many Europeans, imagined what it would be like to emigrate there and how different it was from Europe.   These imagined differences are not only cultural. For Kafka, they are also physical, spatial, and temporal.   And through close attention to these differences, which come out in his […]

Kafka was fascinated with the meaning of innocence and guilt.   His characters are often portrayed as both innocent and guilty.   But the confluence of the two appeals not so much to a theological theme so much as to the reader’s relationship with Kafka’s characters. It seems as if Kafka created a situation where […]

Today, an essay I wrote on Kafka was published by Berfrois (an outstanding and popular online zine based in London, England). Here’s a snippet: Franz Kafka loved to stay on the move. He traveled and kept a travel diary. From his travel diaries, we also learn that Kafka went to spas; he liked to exercise […]

While the distinction between man and animal has, for millennia, been a concern for both monotheism and philosophy, the blurring of that distinction has been of interest to mythology and folklore. And as anyone who has read Franz Kafka knows, the distinction between man and animal is the subject of many of his stories.   As […]

The presence of eternity is terrifying. The idea that something is there and won’t go away may inspire many a mystic but it may also evoke horror. This is especially the case if that presence turns away from humankind and promises no kind of salvation.   Many of us have no interest in facing this presence […]

While many of us see weariness in terms of being overworked, surviving in a failing economy, or being over-stimulated by the ever-changing world, Franz Kafka saw weariness in terms of faith and his battle to understand himself in terms of “eternity.” Weariness does not necessarily signify weakness of faith – or does it? In any […]