Franz Kafka

Frank Kafka Franz Kafka

Commendation Quotes: The book adds significantly to a new image of Kafka, one that goes beyond the isolated prophet of existential despair. It reestablishes him as an important commentator on a wide range of topics, such as social institutions, political changes, and technological innovations in high industrial capitalism. It is a major contribution to cultural studies approaches to Kafka, working out the intriguing ways in which a leading modernist writer represents the spirit of his time for our own. Commendation Quotes: This volume is an important addition to our understanding and appreciation of Kafka and his work. Commendation Quotes: This carefully edited book is one of the best things to have happened to Kafka scholarship in decades. It debunks the naive but widely accepted myth of Kafka the poet, whose work in real life had nothing to do with his literary oeuvre. Just as importantly, the book is a valuable research tool for anyone who studies the impact of modern technology on the social, legal, and political spheres in Western Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. Commendation Quotes: Kafka's office writings, appearing here together in English for the first time, constitute a fascinating discovery. Corngold and Wagner treat readers to a surprising, new Kafka: a high-ranking, confident bureaucrat, whose legal and literary labors were closely intertwined. Commendation Quotes: This lucid and convincing book is a major contribution to the scholarship on Kafka, and on the relationship between literary creativity and professional life. Jacket Description/Flap: "This volume is an important addition to our understanding and appreciation of Kafka and his work."--Harold T. Shapiro, president emeritus, Princeton University"This carefully edited book is one of the best things to have happened to Kafka scholarship in decades. It debunks the naive but widely accepted myth of Kafka the poet, whose work in real life had nothing to do with his literary oeuvre. Just as importantly, the book is a valuable research tool for anyone who studies the impact of modern technology on the social, legal, and political spheres in Western Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century."--Wolf Kittler, University of California, Santa Barbara"The book adds significantly to a new image of Kafka, one that goes beyond the isolated prophet of existential despair. It reestablishes him as an important commentator on a wide range of topics, such as social institutions, political changes, and technological innovations in high industrial capitalism. It is a major contribution to cultural studies approaches to Kafka, working out the intriguing ways in which a leading modernist writer represents the spirit of his time for our own."--Rolf J. Goebel, University of Alabama, Huntsville"Kafka's office writings, appearing here together in English for the first time, constitute a fascinating discovery. Corngold and Wagner treat readers to a surprising, new Kafka: a high-ranking, confident bureaucrat, whose legal and literary labors were closely intertwined."--John Zilcosky, University of Toronto"This lucid and convincing book is a major contribution to the scholarship on Kafka, and on the relationship between literary creativity and professional life."--Russell Berman, Stanford UniversityReview Quotes: "The Office Writings", however, convincingly suggests that his job was also integral to his writing, and that his literary production was not an escape from the alienation of daily life to that 'dreamlike inner life' but a striving to reconcile the two. -- Alexander Provan, The NationReview Quotes: Kafka himself complained constantly that his day job at the Prague Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute oppressed his artistic calling; this volume's editors beg to differ. In the hands of Kafka scholars Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner and the legal scholar Jack Greenberg, the 18 briefs collected here comprise more than a record of the author's years in the insurance business. By reading between his legal writings and his fiction, the editors argue that Kafka's dual identities are inextricable: the writer is informed by the lawyer, the lawyer by the writer. Franz Kafka is the Franz Kafka we know not in spite of his day job, but rather because of it. -- Rachel Sugar, The NationalReview Quotes: [T]he texts have impressive sociological merit: They provide a compelling picture of what life was like for an early twentieth-century bureaucrat who took his work seriously, believed in it, and did it well. . . . But ultimately, the value of "The Office Writings" lies less in the potential connections to Kafka's fiction than in the fundamental disconnect. -- Ben Kafka, BookforumReview Quotes: Cognizant that some readers might be put off by the legal writing style, Corngold (German & comparative literature, Princeton Univ.), Jack Greenberg (law, Columbia Univ.), and Benno Wagner (literature, media, & culture, Univ. of Siegen, Germany) provide ample and rich analyses that demonstrate the close link between Kafka's profession and his literary creativity and oeuvre. This scholarly book is indispensable to an understanding of Kafka. Highly recommended. -- Ali Houissa, Library JournalReview Quotes: This event--finally, the translation and publication of the last known scrap of Kafka's work left untranslated, and unpublished--brings us to the subject of this series: how Kafka's office writings influenced his fiction, and what that influence means. Kafka's office writings, as presented here, cannot be read on their own . . . but, instead, must be read as companions, to demystify the three novels and stories (which are anything but boring). Taken together, though, both workaday fact and masterwork fiction create a network of connections that exposes not just the concerns of a single writer, but also that of a singular culture--the culture of the Office, which has imposed itself on what used to be our lives. -- Joshua Cohen, Nextbook.orgReview Quotes: This handsome volume fills a void in Kafka studies and rectifies the unbalanced image of Kafka as a tortured genius who labored in an insurance office by day and wrote fiction by night. . . . A fascinating read for scholars of Kafka and modern Central European literature. -- M. McCulloh, ChoiceReview Quotes: The editors--Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and Benno Wagner--have done a masterful job in making the drafts of speeches, letters, internal reports and newspaper articles relevant. -- Raymond Johnston, Czech Business WeeklyReview Quotes: These writings reveal Kafka the man at his best. For that reason, "Franz Kafka: The Office Writings" makes a significant contribution to understanding the enigmatic Franz Kafka. -- Jefferson M. Gray, Federal Lawyer Review Citations: London Review of Books 11/20/2008 pg. 3 (EAN 9780691126807, Hardcover) Chronicle of Higher Education 02/13/2009 pg. 21 (EAN 9780691126807, Hardcover) Library Journal 05/01/2009 pg. 78 (EAN 9780691126807, Hardcover) - *Starred Review Choice 04/01/2009 (EAN 9780691126807, Hardcover) Contributor Bio:  Kafka, Franz Franz Kafka was born to Jewish parents in Bohemia in 1883. Kafka's father was a luxury goods retailer who worked long hours and as a result never became close with his son. Kafka's relationship with his father greatly influenced his later writing and directly informed his Brief an den Vater (Letter to His Father). Kafka had a thorough education and was fluent in both German and Czech. As a young man, he was hired to work at an insurance company where he was quickly promoted despite his desire to devote his time to writing rather than insurance. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote a great number of stories, letters, and essays, but burned the majority of his work before his death and requested that his friend Max Brod burn the rest. Brod, however, did not fulfill this request and published many of the works in the years following Kafka's death of tuberculosis in 1924. Thus, most of Kafka's works were published posthumously, and he did not live to see them recognized as some of the most important examples of literature of the twentieth century. Kafka's works are considered among the most significant pieces of existentialist writing, and he is remembered for his poignant depictions of internal conflicts with alienation and oppression. Some of Kafka's most famous works include The Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle. Contributor Bio:  Thomas, Tom TOM THOMAS graduated from the University of Michigan in 1971, with a degree in Psychology. He retired in 2012 after a 40-plus year career in software development, engineering management and sales, mostly in the material handling industry. His retirement coincided with the death of his mother, who bequeathed him a box filled with yellowed newspapers from 1945 and 1946. These were issues of The Honshu Pioneer, a newspaper that Tom's father, Arthur DeLong Thomas, Jr., had helped to found and publish during his service in the U. S. Army. After reviewing some of these ancient documents, Tom decided that the world should hear what these men had to say, so he transcribed and edited every issue in his possession, commenting liberally along the way, and this book was the result.