Overview

Full Product Details

9781472595423

Table of Contents

Reviews

Kafka's writings include legal briefs displaying his expertise in accident insurance together with his fiction, in which accidents are an obsessive theme. With philosophical imagination and scrupulous erudition, Howard Caygill explores this connection to produce fascinating new perspectives on both genres. His conceptual armature makes possible an especially profound and original reading of Kafka's In the Penal Colony. No reader of Caygill's Kafka will fail to be elated. -- Stanley Corngold, Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature, Princeton University, USA Is this book a book? Is it a photograph rather? A film? Or a long parable? Exploring the very centre of Kafka's double life as an author and an insurance company employee, Caygill puts all genres at risk, thus engaging writing in a hazardous and splendid new metamorphosis. -- Catherine Malabou

Kafka's writings include legal briefs displaying his expertise in accident insurance together with his fiction, in which accidents are an obsessive theme. With philosophical imagination and scrupulous erudition, Howard Caygill explores this connection to produce fascinating new perspectives on both genres. His conceptual armature makes possible an especially profound and original reading of Kafka's In the Penal Colony. No reader of Caygill's Kafka will fail to be elated. -- Stanley Corngold, Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature, Princeton University, USA

Kafka's writings include legal briefs displaying his expertise in accident insurance together with his fiction, in which accidents are an obsessive theme. With philosophical imagination and scrupulous erudition, Howard Caygill explores this connection to produce fascinating new perspectives on both genres. His conceptual armature makes possible an especially profound and original reading of Kafka's In the Penal Colony. No reader of Caygill's Kafka will fail to be elated. -- Stanley Corngold, Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature, Princeton University, USA Is this book a book? Is it a photograph rather? A film? Or a long parable? Exploring the very centre of Kafka's double life as an author and an insurance company employee, Caygill puts all genres at risk, thus engaging writing in a hazardous and splendid new metamorphosis. -- Catherine Malabou No work on Kafka (or much else) I know of marries scholarly rigour so effortlessly to speculative risk. By placing at the centre of the corpus the accident, the question that links Kafka's unfamiliar daylight writing for the insurance industry to the night writing we know so well, Caygill discloses an unsuspected strain of defiance and unpredictability in a writer we've come to associate almost reflexively with the inexorable Law of the Father. The result is that impossible thing, a reading of Kafka as original as it is brilliant; you might want to insure yourself against falling off your chair. -- Josh Cohen, Professor of Modern Literary Theory, English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths University of London, UK

Author Information

Howard Caygill is a Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, London, UK. He is the author of On Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available