Expeditions to Kafka: Selected Essays

Table of Contents:
Preface Abbreviations for Works Cited Introduction: Franz Kafka--A Conspectus in Dialogue PART I: INDIVIDUAL WORKS Chapter 1 Caveat: A Personal Overture to The Metamorphosis Chapter 2 Kafka's Hermeneutics Chapter 3 The Metamorphosis, Goethe's Werther, and the Bible Chapter 4 Kafka, The Radical Modernist Chapter 5 Ritardando in The Castle PART II: KAFKA GENERALLY Chapter 6 Kafka, Connoisseur of Mythical Thinking Chapter 7 Special Views on Kafka's Cages Chapter 8 The Singular Accident in a Universe of Risk Chapter 9 Kafka on Property and its Relations PART III: KAFKA IN DIALOGUE WITH COLLOQUISTS Chapter 10 Aphoristic Form in Nietzsche and Kafka Chapter 11 Gershom Scholem's Gnostically-Minded View of Kafka Chapter 12 Kafka's “A Report to An Academy” with Adorno PART IV: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES Chapter 13 Kafka and Dominant Critical Approaches Acknowledgments About the Author Index

About the Author :
Stanley Corngold is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, USA, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of 10 books, including, The Mind in Exile (Princeton University Press, 2022). He has edited 11 books, including the Norton Critical Edition of Kafka's Selected Stories (ed. and trans., with preface, notes and critical apparatus) and the Modern Library edition of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (ed. and trans., with introduction, notes, and critical materials).

Review :
The essays in the present volume demonstrate why Corngold is responsible in great degree for readers' understanding of Kafka's literary imagination. Corngold provides a critical road map through nearly a century of Kafka scholarship, with footnotes genuflecting to the previous generation ... Recommended [for] lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. With superb erudition and his inimitable flair, Stanley Corngold's Expeditions offer a magisterial guide through the intricate and ambiguous terrain of Kafka's texts. Insights abound, providing a comprehensive and consistently profound investigation that strikes the perfect balance between drawing interpretive conclusions and maintaining hermeneutic openness-a culminating accomplishment by Kafka's most inspired and most inspiring reader. You are not being introduced to Kafka – you fall into his stories as you fall into a trap, the bait emerging in the interstices between his words and your mind. That said, Corngold's Expeditions are by far the best introduction to Kafka I have seen. He invites you to join him on his ventures into Continent Kafka, and he inspires you to stray off from his expeditions on your own terms, and risk. Stanley Corngold has been reading, reflecting, and commenting on Kafka and his writings for more than half a century. He has become our most penetrating and luminous guide to Kafka's labyrinthine world. These essays, the distillate of a lifetime, manage both to reveal and to preserve the mystery of Kafka's genius. There is hardly an area of Kafka's life, hardly a debate in Kafka criticism that Expeditions does not weigh in on. In this essay collection, Corngold brings to bear a lifetime of work as an eminently gifted, astute, and diligent translator, editor, and critic.