Franz Kafka’s enigmatic and frequently ominous narratives continue to exercise a fascination over readers far removed historically and geographically from the world he inhabited. His fictions are typically stripped of overt reference to a particular location or time, offering an imaginative distillation of his historically and culturally specific experiences (including his extensive reading). Part of the fascination of reading Kafka is the sense that the surfaces of his texts encode deeper meanings, so that we feel impelled to search for these deeper meanings as we read. Symbol, metaphor, and analogy play an important part in his narratives, as do language games, a dimension that is inevitably often lost in translation. The physical exteriors of his protagonists (most of them male) are…
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Citation: Dodd, William J.. "Franz Kafka". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 January 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2429, accessed 21 November 2024.]
