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Franz Kafka |
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Allen Thiher's 1990 book (see the "Bibliography" below), a volume in Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction series, provides for the student a useful compendium and brief overview of critical approaches to Kafka's writings. His own application of DECONSTRUCTIONIST techniques to a writer highly suited to such study is signified by the conclusion of his preface: "the allegory that questions our possibility of interpreting it will also make it most difficult to find any real certainty--for the very process of the allegory denies that final knowledge that certainty exists. Thus Kafka has invented for us the contemporary allegory par excellence: a self-referential symbolic form that symbolizes paradoxically its own incapacity to symbolize."
Thiher demonstrates the relevance of a BIOGRAPHICAL approach to the hermetic world of Kafka's fiction by providing twenty pages of excerpts chosen from Kafka's voluminous letters and diaries, excerpts that contain his comments on particular works as well as more general reflections on the process of writing and the role of the artist. Thiher then devotes more than thirty pages to excerpts from five critical articles that illustrate a range of responses to Kafka's work: FORMALIST (Stanley Corngold: "Kafka's Narrative Perspective"), GENDER (Ruth V. Gross: "Of Mice and Women: Reflections on a Discourse in Kafka's 'Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse'"), MYTHOLOGICAL (Doreen F. Fowler: "'In the Penal Colony': Kafka's Unorthodox Theology"), PSYCHOLOGICAL (William J. Dodd: "Kafka and Freud: A Note on In der Strafkolonie"), and SOCIOLOGICAL (Walter H. Sokel: "From Marx to Myth: The Structure and Function of Self-Alienation in Kafka's 'Metamorphosis'").
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