In this new volume of Kafka studies, which is addressed to both beginning readers of Kafka as well as Kafka scholars, Stanley Corngold discusses Kafka's work in a variety of novel perspectives, including Goethe's The Sufferings of Young Werther; Nietzsche's conception of aphoristic form; bureaucratic organization; accident and risk; the logic of possession and inheritance; and myth, among others.

Even as Corngold explores Kafka's work across different fields and tangents, he does so in vivid, readable prose, free of jargon, and with an eye to Kafka's ongoing relevance to the concerns of his day and ours. Taken together these linked essays reveal Kafka in his astonishing many-sidedness.

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