Franz Kafka, the “German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and short-story writer,” is customarily identified with “modernism.” Thus Wikipedia (whence the above description also comes from): “the majority of [Kafka’s] output was associated with the experimental modernist genre.”
Fine. But what does that mean? We dutifully click through to the Wikipedia entry on “literary modernism” and learn that it “is characterized by a very self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing, in both poetry and prose fiction…. This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of [the modernists’] time.”
Though this is doubtless a standard way of thinking of Kafka in paraphrase, as it were, it may conceal as much as it reveals. Such would have been the opinion of W.H. Auden.
Read Full Article »