Kafka's Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle (Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siecle)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.52 (876 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0198159072 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 264 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-12-17 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Between these two claims lies the largely unexplored region in which the European decadent movement turned into the modernist avant-garde. The result is a startlingly unconventional portrait of Kafka and Prague at the turn of the century, involving such issues as Jungendstil aesthetics, Otto Weininger's "egoless" woman, the Viennese critique of architectural ornament, the clothing reform movement, anti-Semitism, and the question of Jewish-German writing.. Rather than posit a break between these two personae, Anderson charts the historical continuities between the young Kafka and the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial. In this original historical study, Anderson explores Kafka's early dandyism, his interest in fashion, literary decadence and the "superficial" spectacle of modern urban life as well as his subsequent repudiation of these phenomena in forging a literary identity as the isolated, otherworldly "poet" of modern alienation. "One should either be a work of art, or wear one," proclaimed Oscar Wilde at the end of the nineteenth century; "I am made of literature, I am nothing else, and cannot be anything else," Franz Kafka declared a decade later
We call Anderson delivers! A Gem! While his previous two works, "From the Ground Up: A Study of the Use of Prepositions in The Dramatic Works of Nikolai Gogal," and "Metamorphosis," were both gloriously academic and even enjoyable, Mark M. Anderson scores with his newest! (Although I did find his insect to human thing interesting.) "Kafka's Clothes" gives us an indepth view into the wardrobe of this guy Franz K
"An innovative study of Kafka's search for literature, cogent and elegantly argued throughout."--Choice"A fascinating and insightful reading of Kafka, which places the Czech writer's attitude to the body, and his engagement with theories of body culture, art and adornment of his period, at the centre of his work."--The Guardian"Spritely, innovative, and provocative.It is a book about Kafka worth reading."--London Times Saturday Review"By focusing on Kafka's clothes as image and reality, Mark Anderson succeeds in a
Mark Anderson is translator and editor of In the Storm of the Roses: Selected Poems by Ingeborg Bachmann (Princeton UP, 1986), and editor of Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics and the Fin de Siecle, Schocken Books, NY, 1989.