![]() ![]() Everything he wrote that could fairly be deemed a narrative fiction (some of his shorter works are prose poems) is included in The Complete Stories (omni 1971). ![]() Many more were included in posthumous compilations including Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer: Ungedruckte Erzählungen und Prosa aus Dem Nachlas (coll 1931 trans Willa and Edwin Muir as The Great Wall of China and Other Pieces 1933) and Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande (coll 1953 trans Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins as Wedding Preparations in the Country and Other Posthumous Prose Writings 1954), the most significant of these in fantastic terms being perhaps the title story (written 1917) of the first volume, whose evocation of an illimitable Time Abyss has been deeply influential, almost in secret, on many authors (see also Ruins and Futurity). All seven books that Kafka himself published (some of them of pamphlet length) were assembled as Erzählungen und Kleine Prosa (omni 1935 trans Willa and Edwin Muir as The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces coll 1948 cut vt In the Penal Settlement: Tales and Short Prose Works 1949). ![]() Other stories and fables appeared before Kafka's death, an example of interest being the Apes as Human tale, "Ein Bericht für eine Akademie" (October 1917 Der Jude), which was assembled with thirteen further tales as Ein Landarzt: Kleine Erzählungen (coll dated 19 trans Vera Leslie as The Country Doctor: A Collection of Short Stories 1945 chap). The first story tells of an execution or Torture machine which incises the nature or name of his crime onto the victim's body (see Automata Crime and Punishment) the latter is a terrifyingly matter-of-fact novella of alienation and/or manifest destiny (see Horror in SF) in which the young Gregor Samsa awakens one morning, having been transformed in his sleep into a huge beetle despite the never-expressed horror of the situation, the tale is at points hilarious. It might be suggested that the Kafkaesque displacement (or foregrounding) is towards the future: that is, to the modern world, properly seen, phenomenally divested of "civilization". Kafka's work is a central demonstration of a principle at the heart of fantastika in general: that a text should be read literally before it is read figuratively that to see the modern world is to experience the uncanny intuition that the familiar and the unfamiliar are faces of the same reality that in experiencing wrongness we are experiencing the true story of things.Īll the same, in contrast to some Czech contemporaries like Karel Čapek or Gustav Meyrink, Kafka cannot be very profitably understood as anything like a straightforward writer of fantasy or sf, though it is increasingly clear, just short of a century after his death, that some of his stories – such as the nakedly Satirical In der Strafkolonie (written 1914 1919 chap variously trans) and Die Verwandlung (October 1915 Die Weißen Blätter 1915 chap trans A L Lloyd as The Metamorphosis 1937 chap) – present through a prose of hallucinated (but in no sense delusional) transparency a world radically displaced from the normally perceived reality (see Fabulation Perception) of preWar Europe. It is this deadpan literal clarity, perhaps even more than his parable-like storylines, that makes him a central figure in Fantastika – a term that has been used in the Czech Republic (and elsewhere) to encompass the non-mimetic literatures of our times, though without some specific descriptors governing its use in this encyclopedia. He may not have been a writer conspicuously eager to publish, but the picture of him (common until recent years) as a man pathologically estranged from the world is of little help in attempting to understand his work: not only its "Kafkaesque" frustrations and abysses, but also its humour and its prescient clarity of vision about the true lineaments of the twentieth-century world. Though much of his work had already been written (and some of it published) before 1918, Kafka continued to participate in the Prague world, releasing a further three titles before his death six years later. #Kafka writer full#(1883-1924) Czech author, a Jew who wrote in German, a full tri-cultural inhabitant therefore of the cosmopolitan world that would eventually become Czechoslovakia (see Czech and Slovak SF) after the trauma of World War One, a civilization whose death throes began in 1938. ![]()
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