Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...arts and letters were responsible for some of the silliest absurdities. Jean-Paul Sartre's fabulously successful play about our South, The Respectful Prostitute, presents only more nakedly the whole creaky paraphernalia of America as seen and believed, in one degree or another, by the European intelligentsia from Kafka to Kingsley Martin...
...pioneers who staked out the new boundaries of modern literature were Novelists Feodor Dostoevsky and Franz Kafka. Dostoevsky made a pre-Freudian exploration of the grand canyon that separates a man's public acts from his private thoughts-the split in the human atom. But in Dostoevsky's day the social frame within which his split men operated was still all of a piece, held together by principles of law & order and morality. By the time Kafka came on the scene, early in the 20th century, the frame itself was split. The rules and principles of Dostoevsky...
...famous novels, The Trial and The Castle, Kafka described the workings of this nightmare. Since then, Kafka's visions of the bemusement of modern life have lurked in the background of many contemporary novels. But Italy's Dino Buzzati, best known in the U.S. for his children's story, The Bears' Famous Invasion in Sicily, is one of the few who have come close to rewriting a whole Kafka parable. The Tartar Steppe follows the style, mood and architecture of Kafka's Castle, the story of man struggling hopelessly to enter a stronghold in whose...
This sounds like the Existentialist answer to the modern dilemma-an answer which assumes that all questions of faith are pointless and only man's pride and courage are of value. It is an answer that would have left Kafka as restless as before and convinced Dostoevsky that the Nihilists had won the day. But Author Buzzati, no Existentialist himself, presents it as a universal truth, a faith to die for; and so, though The Tartar Steppe suffers from being a copy of The Castle, it gains from the gravity and human sympathy with which it is written. Like...
Wise Blood commands attention for its oddness, and for its occasional passages of crisp writing and sly humor. But all too often it reads as if Kafka had been set to writing the continuity for L'il Abner...