Isak Winkel Holm

Kafka's Stereoscopes (eBook, ePUB)

The Political Function of a Literary Style

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

In 1911, Franz Kafka encountered the Kaiser Panorama: a stereoscopic peep show offering an illusion of three-dimensional depth. After the experience, he began to emulate the apparatus in his literary sketches, developing a style we might call "stereoscopic," juxtaposing, like the optical stereoscope, two images of the same object seen from slightly different perspectives.

Isak Winkel Holm argues that Kafka's stereoscopic style is crucial to an understanding of the relation between literature and politics in Kafka's work. At the level of content, the stereoscopic style offers a representation of the basic order of a specific community. At the level of form, the stereoscopic style is structured as the juxtaposition of two dissimilar images of the same community. At the level of function, finally, the style provokes a reconsideration, and perhaps even a reconfiguration, of the social order itself.

With insights from literary studies, philosophical aesthetics and political theory, Kafka's Stereoscopes offers a detailed but highly readable argument for the relevance of Kafka's literary works in today's political reality.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
• Seitenzahl: 296
• Erscheinungstermin: 19. September 2019
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781501347832
• Artikelnr.: 57708354

Autorenporträt

Isak Winkel Holm is Professor of Comparative Literature at University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His previous publications include Tanken i billedet. Søren Kierkegaards poetik (Thinking in Images: The Poetics of Søren Kierkegaard, Gyldendal 1998) and Stormløb mod grænsen: det politiske hos Franz Kafka (Storming the Border: the Political in Kafka, Gyldendal 2015).