Kafka's turn to technology: Intersections of modern science and literature in the works of Franz Kafka

Jason Edward Baumer, Purdue University

Abstract

Franz Kafka is clearly one of the most prolific authors of the modern age whose literature continues to contribute to a global dialogue on Modernism. Yet despite being one of the most well-known authors in the modern era, there is still no longer form literary analysis that addresses Kafka's treatment of the subjects and themes of modern science and technology in his writing. This dissertation surveys and analyzes the ways in which Kafka incorporates concrete examples of modern technology in his writing to show how he combines their scientific contexts with the distinct artistic representation of different literary genres to address crucial themes of the modern age. In "Kafka's Turn to Technology: Intersections of Modern Science and Literature in The Works of Franz Kafka" I survey the spectrum of Kafka's writing, using examples of his private and professional writing, his self-published and posthumous fiction, and two of his novel fragments in order to show the origins and developments of Kafka's technological turn. Kafka's reputation as the macabre inventor of the Execution Apparatus has thus far overshadowed the more serious questions that he presents readers in his treatment of technology. In this dissertation, I show how Kafka's uses the literary genres of the editorial, the short story, myth and the Bildungsroman to chronicle and to critically engage the emerging transportation, communication and mechanical reproduction technologies of his day. I elucidate how Kafka's treatment of technology in the spectrum of his writing amounts to far more than a snapshot of the planes, ships and trains of the early twentieth-century. Using examples from "Die Aeroplane in Brescia," "In der Strafkolonie," Der Verschollene and Das Schloß, I examine the ways that Kafka uses technical subjects and mechanical metaphors to question the greater ethical, social and psychological issues so characteristic of the modern age. By examining these works in-depth for their treatment of technology and by placing them in the context of Kafka's other treatment of modern science and technology elsewhere in his writing, I argue that Kafka's technological turn is a defining characteristic of his own modern legend.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

William, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Germanic literature

COinS