Clayton Koelb

Student guide to Franz Kafka, focusing on giving guidance through the difficulties readers can encounter in studying his work.

Kafka: A Guide for the Perplexed

Richard T. Gray

Ruth V. Gross

Rolf J. Goebel

Known for depicting alienation, frustration, and the victimization of the individual by impenetrable bureaucracies, Kafka's works have given rise to the term Kafkaesque. This encyclopedia details Kafka's life and writings. Included are more than 800 alphabetically arranged entries on his works, characters, family members and acquaintances, themes, and other topics. Most of the entries cite works for further reading, and the Encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography.

A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia

Where do writers of fiction get their ideas? Clayton Koelb here takes issue with those who regard inspiration or imitation as primary forces influencing literary invention. He finds that another mechanism, which he calls "rhetorical construction," underlies much fiction and some nonfiction as well. Rhetorical construction, Koelb says, is a way of producing writing out of reading. The rhetorical writer begins by discovering an interpretive crux in a familiar text-a passage from the Bible, for example, or a commonplace expression—and then proceeds to imagine a fictional situation in which all the meanings of the passage, contradictory though they may seem, may be realized. According to Koelb, "inventions of reading" do not stop with the discovery of the eternal and inevitable deconstructibility of language; they somehow generate an urge to put language back together through the invention of a fictional world. Among the texts he discusses are writings by Boccaccio, Rabelais, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hawthorne, Hans Christian Andersen Nietzsche, Kafka, Calvino, and Flannery O'Connor.

Rhetoric and the Literary Imagination

Inventions of Reading

Susan Noakes

Approaches to Theory and Practice

The Comparative Perspective on Literature

Literature and the Function of Disbelief

The Incredulous Reader

Reading as key to the mysterious relation between lifeless material bodies and living, animate beings in Romantic fiction and thought.

Literature, Philosophy, and the Theory of Life in Europe's Romantic Age

The Revivifying Word

Franz Kafka is one of the most widely taught, and read, writers in world literature. Readers encountering texts like 'The Metamorphosis' and The Trial for the first time are frequently perplexed by his often intentionally weird writing. Some might say that Kafka's enduring achievement has been to make his readers love being perplexed. As much of Kafka's writing is designed to perplex the reader, this guide helps the reader understand why and how perplexity has been deliberately created by Kafka's text and to realize what the uses of such perplexity might be. The book guides readers through their first encounters with Kafka and introduces the problems involved in reading his texts, the nature of his texts from the key novels and novellas to letters and professional writings, his life as a writer and different approaches to reading Kafka.

In the first book to study Franz Kafka from the perspective of modern rhetorical theory, Clayton Koelb explores such questions as how Kafka understood the reading process, how he thematized the problematic of reading, and how his highly distinctive style relates to what Koelb describes as the "passion of reading."

The Passion of Reading

Kafka's Rhetoric

Few would deny that comparative literature is rapidly moving from the periphery toward the center of literary studies in North America, but many are still unsure just what it is. The Comparative Perspective on Literature shows by means of twenty-two exemplary essays by many of the most distinguished scholars in the field how comparative literature as a discipline is conceived of and practiced in the 1980s. Nearly all of them published here for the first time, the essays discuss and themselves reflect significant changes at the core of the field as well as evolving notions as to what comparative literature is and should be. The volume editors, Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes, have included essays that address the scope and concerns of comparative literature today, historical and international contexts of the field, and the relationship of literary criticism to other disciplines, as well as affording comparative perspectives on current critical issues.

Legendary Figures examines revolutionary views of the past that have played a crucial role in European and American literature of the last 150 years. Clayton Koelb traces these new approaches to history through an impressive range of novels,øfrom Flaubert?s Salammb– to Christa Wolf?s Cassandra. Koelb argues that this new ?historical sense,? which arose in the mid?nineteenth century, gained eloquent expression in Flaubert?s writings. What is crucial about the new historical sense is that it views the past as essentially ?alien? and ?other.? The connection between past and present may be powerful, but it is always indirect and difficult to negotiate. As a result, the past seems exotic and unattainable, the object of nostalgia and desire. Koelb distinguishes this sense of history, with its persistent discontinuities between past and present, from the more continuous and progressive views of history of novelists like Sir Walter Scott and such philosophers as Hegel, Marx, and Luk¾cs. In their writings, history ?proceeds according to the laws of cause and effect, and each epoch can be understood as both the result of the previous one and the cause of the next.? In contrast, the modernist writers that Koelb examines?Flaubert, Pater, Mann, Broch, Wilder, Yourcenar, and Wolf?imagine a past that is ?mythic? and ?legendary? and thus a metaphor for everything distant, complicated, unattainable, and unknowable.

Ancient History in Modern Novels

Legendary Figures

This book addresses the quite timely question of the place of Nietasche's thought with respect to the Western tradition; the question whether Nietzsche defines or denies the very notion of philosophy as a tradition.

Essays Pro and Contra

Nietzsche as Postmodernist

More than 800 alphabetically arranged entries detail the life and works of one of the most enduring authors of world literature.

Clayton Koelb

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