Kafka and World-Literature: Reading, Registration, Resistance

Abstract

Kafka is generally acclaimed as one of the greatest writers of all times and his name has come to signify what generally is considered to be the best of World Literature understood as a hallowed canon of great authors. This, however, also has led to a kind of domestication and co-optation of Kafka. I propose questioning some accepted notions concerning the way we read Kafka and understand the field of World Literature. My talk is divided in three sections, as expressed in the subtitle: Reading, Registration, and Resistance, and throughout I will draw principally on Der Verschollene. (1983 [Amerika: The Missing Person, 2008) In the first I want to examine a few well-known previous readings of Kafka, principally Theodor Adorno’s ‘Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka’ (1953 [‘Notes on Kafka’]), which, to an extent, greatly influence mine, even if I do not always follow them. In the second I will examine the concept of registration as proposed by the Warwick Research Collective, so as to reflect on Kafka in terms of the semi-periphery as part of Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-System Theory. And in the final one, I want to draw on those two and suggest Kafka’s writing as a form of resistance.