Freedom and Confinement in Modernity

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.

'Focusing on one of Kafka's crucial problem images the cage, the prisoner, the question of imprisonment, escape, and freedom Freedom and Confinement in Modernity does away with the misleading conception of imprisonment as lack of freedom. Instead, it combines a rich variety of approaches to unfold the cage as agent of cultural productivity and of literature itself. This volume provides a shining example of collaboration between philosophy, cultural studies, and literary theory.' - Benno Wagner, Professor, Siegen University, Germany

'The essays collected in Freedom and Confinement in Modernity set out to pursue a novel approach to Kafka's world. The focus on the figure of the 'cage' is thoughtful and original, as it allows us to rethink the literary specificity of Kafka's texts in terms of broader sociopolitical concerns, and situates Kafka's challenging work at the transdisciplinary core of fields as diverse as aesthetic theory, political philosophy, literary history, and psychoanalysis. This is a marvelous and thought-provoking volume.' - Gerhard Richter, Professor of German and Director of the Graduate Program in Critical Theory, University of California, Davis

'The power to stimulate fresh questions rather than put to rest earlier ones is surely a mark of what we have come to call greatness in a writer. Few have matched Kafka in generating successive challenges to conventional wisdom not only about literature, but also about life. In Freedom and Confinement in Modernity we come to know a new Kafka, who forces us to rethink many of our assumptions about the delicate relationship between constraint and emancipation in the modern era.' - Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California Berkeley

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