This book is a compact study of Kafka's inimitable literary style, animals, and ecological thoughthis nonhuman formthat proceeds through original close readings of Kafka's oeuvre. With select engagements of Adorno, Derrida, and the literary heritage from Romanticism to Dickens that influenced Kafka, Ted Geier discusses Kafka's literary, nonhuman form and the way it unsettles the notion of a natural and simple existence that society and culture impose, including the boundaries between human and animal. Through careful attention to the formal predicaments of Kafka's works and engaging with Kafka's original legal and social thought in his novels and short stories, this book renders Kafka's sometimes impossibly enigmatic work legible at the level of its expression, bringing surprising shape to his work and redefining what scholars and readers have understood as the Kafkaesque.

Recasts Kafka's works to reveal a deeper political purpose behind the appearances of nonhuman forms Bridges recent theories included within the nonhuman turn with close literary analyses of Kafka's original German Touches upon a wide portion of Kafka's well known work including The Trial, The Metamorphosis, and his short stories, as well as works such as Amerika that have received less attention

Autorentext

Ted Geier is currently Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University and the founder of the Interdisciplinary Animal Studies Group at the University of California, Davis, USA. He has taught comparative literature, cinema, Romanticism, and American cultural studies at San Francisco State University, Davis, and Rice. He is the author of articles and book chapters on animals and ecology in the works of Italo Calvino, recent world literature, and British literature of the long nineteenth century, in addition to ecocinema, especially in the work of Terrence Malick.

Inhalt

Introduction: Present progression, always-already: grammars of the nonhuman.- Chapter One: Digging in (not digging it): obsessive creatures and sociality.- Chapter Two: Finding oneself awoken from: nonhuman metamorphoses.- Chapter Three: Unlike a dog, having done nothing wrong: after the law.- Conclusion: Interminable subjects.- Works Cited or Consulted.- Index.