Kafka writings

offers, the very first time in English, Kafka's most fascinating expert writings, composed during their many years as a high-ranking attorney aided by the biggest Workmen's crash Insurance Institute in the Czech Lands for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is usually named the greatest German prose author of the twentieth century. It is less well known he had a recognised legal profession. Kafka's briefs reveal him to-be a canny bureaucrat, sharp litigator, and revolutionary thinker regarding social, political, and legal issues of their time. Their formal preoccupations empowered most of the motifs and methods of this novels and stories he wrote through the night.

These papers consist of articles on workmen's settlement and office protection; appeals for the founding of a psychiatric hospital for shell-shocked veterans; and letters arguing relentlessly for a salary adequate to his merit. In adjudicating disputes, marketing legislative programs, and investigating workplace web sites, Kafka's writings teem with information regarding the bureaucracy and technology of their day, eg spa elevators in Marienbad, the task of car, plus the perils of excavating in quarries while drunk. Wonderfully translated, with valuable commentary by two worldwide's leading Kafka scholars plus one of The united states's most eminent civil rights solicitors, the documents cast wealthy light in the guy in addition to journalist and offer brand new insights to lovers of Kafka's books and stories.

Stanley Corngold is professor of German and comparative literature at Princeton University. Jack Greenberg could be the Alphonse Fletcher Professor of Law at Columbia University. Benno Wagner is a professor when you look at the Department of Literature, Media, and society in the University of Siegen in Germany.

Reviews:

"any office Writings, however, convincingly implies that his job was also fundamental to his writing, hence his literary production was not an escape through the alienation of lifestyle to that particular 'dreamlike inner life' but a striving to get together again the 2."-Alexander Provan, The Country

"Kafka himself reported continuously that their day work in the Prague Workmen's crash Insurance Institute oppressed his creative calling; this amount's editors beg to vary. In the hands of Kafka scholars Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner together with legal scholar Jack Greenberg, the 18 briefs accumulated here include significantly more than a record of writer's many years in the insurance coverage company. By reading between his legal writings along with his fiction, the editors argue that Kafka's dual identities are inextricable: the copywriter is informed because of the attorney, the lawyer because of the publisher. Franz Kafka could be the Franz Kafka we realize not regardless of their time work, but instead because of it."-Rachel Sugar, The National (Abu Dhabi)

"[T]he texts have impressive sociological quality: they offer a powerful image of what life had been like for an early twentieth-century bureaucrat which took their work seriously, believed in it, and achieved it really. . . . But eventually, the value regarding the workplace Writings lies less within the possible connections to Kafka's fiction than in the fundamental disconnect."-Ben Kafka, Bookforum

"Cognizant that some readers might be put off because of the legal writing style, Corngold (German & comparative literary works, Princeton Univ.), Jack Greenberg (law, Columbia Univ.), and Benno Wagner (literary works, media, & tradition, Univ. of Siegen, Germany) offer sufficient and rich analyses that prove the close website link between Kafka's occupation along with his literary creativity and oeuvre. This scholarly book is essential to knowledge of Kafka. Strongly suggested."-Ali Houissa, Library Journal (Starred Review)