Franz Kafka 18831924

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Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

• "I think we ought to read only the kind of
  books that wound and stab us...We need the books
  that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us
  deeply, like the death of someone we loved more
  than ourselves, like being banished into forests
  far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be
  the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

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Kafkas Life

• A German Jew in Prague
• A frustrated writer whose father forced him into
  a career as a bank clerk
• Published very little in his lifetime
• Left orders for all of his manuscripts to be
  destroyed when he died
• His executor, disobeyed his orders and Kafka
  became famous after his death

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Kafkaesque
A situation in which someone is at the mercy of a
collective logic that he or she does not
understand and perceives to be comically absurd.

• Metamorphosis A traveling salesman is turned
  into a bug in the first sentence
• The Castle A man named K. is summoned to work as
  a surveyor in a castle, but the castles
  bureaucracy prevents him from ever arriving at
  his destination.
• The Trial A man named Joseph K. is accused of a
  crime and forced to mount a defense, but he is
  never told what his supposed crime is.

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Kafka Three Movements

• Expressionism
• Surrealism
• Existentialism

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Expressionism

• An artistic movement that held that art should
  represent the internal reality (usually painful)
  rather than attempting to recreate or reproduce
  external realitywhich art can never do.

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Surrealism

• An artistic movement that focused on
  impossibilities and contradictions that suggested
  the subconscious reality of the dream world
  rather than the tangible reality of the physical
  world.

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One Second Before Awakening, Salvador Dali
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Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali
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The Crucifiction, Salvador Dali
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Carte Blanche, Rene Magritte
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Beautiful World, Rene Magritte
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The Human Condition, Rene Magritte
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Infinite Divisibility, Yves Tanguy
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Existentialism

• The most significant philosophical movement of
  the 20th century, EXISTENTIALISM is the belief
  that reality, in any meaningful sense, must be
  created through individual actions and choices.
• Existentialism is the opposite of
  ESSENTIALISM, or the belief that reality,
  meaning, and significance precede individual
  actions and choices.

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• Essentialism To be is to do.
• Existentialism To do is to be.
• Sinatraism Do be do be do.

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Non-Existence

• For existentialists, failure to act in any
  meaningful way because a failure to exist. (Think
  Peer Gynt and the Buttonmoulder)
• Failure to act for oneself became a failure to
  define oneself.
• Selflessness, usually seen as a virtue in
  essentialist thought, became literally the
  absence of a self.