By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘A Hunger Artist’, published in 1922, is a short story by Franz Kafka (1883-1924). The story is about a hunger artist in a circus who sits in a cage and fasts for weeks on end. However, after forty days have passed, the impresario who runs the circus always puts an end to the hunger artist’s period of fasting. But what is the meaning of this story? Is it, as is so often the case with Kafka’s fiction, a modern fable?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘A Country Doctor’ is one of the best-known and most widely studied short stories by Franz Kafka (1883-1924). This short story, which Kafka wrote during the winter of 1916-17, tells of a country doctor who makes a visit to a nearby village to tend to a sick boy, but the doctor’s account of his experiences is full of bizarre and unlikely details – details which make us question the doctor’s sanity.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Before the Law’ is a short story or parable by the German-language Bohemian (now Czech) author Franz Kafka (1883-1924). It was published in 1915 and later included in Kafka’s (posthumously published) novel The Trial, where its meaning is discussed by the protagonist Josef K. and a priest he meets in a cathedral. ‘Before the Law’ has inspired numerous critical interpretations and prompted many a debate, in its turn, about what it means.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Judgment’, written in 1912, was in many ways Franz Kafka’s breakthrough work. In this short story, a man writes to his friend who is living in Russia. He then speaks to his father, who questions whether the friend even exists. At the end of the story, the man’s father condemns his son to death by drowning, and the son goes and throws himself into the river.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) has been called everything from a modernist to an existentialist, a fantasy writer to a realist. His work almost stands alone as its own subgenre, and the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ – whose meaning, like the meaning of Kafka’s work, is hard to pin down – has become well-known even to people who have never read a word of Kafka’s writing.
Perhaps inevitably, he is often misinterpreted as being a gloomy and humourless writer about nightmarish scenarios, when this at best conveys only part of what he is about.