BASC80118 - Kafka’s Parables

Course Description

Instructor: Drew Dixon

“Had one to name the artist who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age”—muses W.H. Auden, writing in 1941—“that Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.” Auden also argues that an essential aspect of Kafka's artistry is his mastery of a particular, peculiar form, that of “the pure parable,” of which “Kafka is a great, perhaps the greatest, master.”

Following Auden's insight—and his recommendation that these later, shorter fictions are Kafka's “finest work" and “certainly the best introduction”—we will explore Kafka's oeuvre by: beginning with a wide selection of Kafka’s classic 1-2 page parables (which not only take up ‘Kafkaesque’ themes and motifs such as unknowable laws & authorities, and uncannily anthropomorphic animals, but also reconceive various literary and mythical subjects, e.g., Don Quixote, The Tower of Babel, Prometheus, Poseidon, and the Sirens); then turning to two of latest, finest short stories (“The Great Wall of China” and “Josephine, the Singer; or the Mouse Folk”); and finishing by reading what may be his magnum opus, “The Metamorphosis.”