Kafka

1
Kafkas Isms

• Schools of Thought on
• The Metamorphosis

2
Interpretations of The Metamorphosis

• Over the years, Kafkas fiction has been
  interpreted in many different ways, therefore his
  work has been adopted by different schools of
  thought and had various theories and beliefs
  applied to it.
• The three primary examples are
• 1 Surrealism
• 2 Existentialism
• 3 Freudianism

3
Surrealism

• Super realism developed in France in the early
  1900s.
• Surrealism stressed the power of imagination and
  dreams over conscious control or rational
  thinking.

4
Surrealist painters like Salvador Dali depicted
objects as they never appear in reality.

• The Persistence of Memory 1931

5
Existentialism

• A philosophical, religious, and artistic movement
  characterized by
• The belief that people are created or formed by
  the experiences they have. It is action and
  choice that give life meaning, not simply the act
  of existing.
• Rene Descartes I think, therefore I am
• Human nature is irrational and chaotic, but human
  beings are free to make their own moral choices
  in life.

6
Existentialism and Kafka

• During the literary modernist movement in the
  1900s, authors began describing dystopian
  societies and surreal and absurd situations in a
  parallel universe, a trend that paralleled the
  existentialist movement. In Franz Kafka's novella
  The Metamorphosis, a man awakes to the
  realization that he has turned into a creature
  known as a "vermin". This story, which is
  certainly "absurd" and surreal, is one of many
  modernist literary works that influenced and were
  influenced by existentialist philosophy. (From
  Wikipedia.com)

7
Important Existentialists

• Soren Kirkegaard- Father of existentialism
  stressed the importance of the self.
• Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a play called No Exit and
  known for stating, Hell is other people.