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 provides a new reading of imprisonment suggesting it allows Kafka to perform a critique of a modernity instead.

Autorentext
DIMITRIS VARDOULAKIS teaches at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. KIARINA A. KORDELA teaches at Macalester College, USA.

Inhalt
Kafka's Cages: An Introduction - Kiarina Kordela and Dimitris Vardoulakis * PART 1: Interpreting Kafka's Cages * Special Views on Kafka's Cages - Stanley Corngold * Delusions of Agency: Kafka, Imprisonment, and Modern Victimhood - Chris Fleming and John O'Carroll * Kafka and Derrida Before the Laws - Howard Caygill * PART 2: Reconceptualizations of Kafka's Cages * Kafka's Cage - John Mowitt * 'The Fall is the proof of our freedom'': Mediated Freedom in Kafka - Dimitris Vardoulakis * 'Workforce without Possessions': Kafka, 'Social Justice,' and the Word Religion - Peter Fenves * Kafkaesque: (Secular) Kabbalah and Allegory - A. Kiarina Kordela * The Ethics and Beauty of The Trial: Kafka's Circumscription of Failure - Ross Shields * PART 3: Performatives of Kafka's Cages * Kafka's Fatal Performatives: Between 'Bad Conscience' and Betrayed Vulnerability - Karyn Ball * How Is the Trapeze Possible? - Christophe Bident * With Impunity - Henry Sussman