'Von der strengen Vorschrift der Gesetze': Textual process and revisionism in Heinrich von Kleist and Franz Kafka

This dissertation reads several texts by Kleist and Kafka using the theories of Harold Bloom. Kleist was a principal influence on Kafka and their texts lend themselves to interpretations in terms of the critical concepts developed by Bloom, concepts such as revisionism, the anxiety of influence, the revisionary ratios, and evasion. Of particular importance is how the "textual process" discernible in their texts can be linked up with Bloom's notion of revisionism. Yet simultaneously this project understands itself also as a critical engagement with Bloom's theories, not just an application of them. Indeed, the textual practice of Bloom at times runs parallel to that of Kafka and Kleist. After a theoretical introduction exploring two major aspects of Bloom's criticism, his "Gnosticism" and the "map of misreading," this study surveys the major ways in which Kleist's influence on Kafka is readily visible. Starting from a variety of elements common to both writers, I offer interpretations of four texts that put Bloom's critical concepts to use in a variety of ways. The first interpretation, of Kafka's "Die Sorge des Hausvaters," is exemplary for three reasons: one, we can discern in it an emphatic type of discontinuity, which is one of Kafka's primary debts to Kleist; two, the "process" of the text is especially perceptible here, thus assisting us in revealing the same quality in the other texts; and three, the brief text of this evasive being "Odradek" can be read remarkably well according to Bloom's map of misreading. These three elements then play various roles in the interpretations that follow. Die Marquise von O... unfolds according to a similar anti-narrativistic logic, where we can understand the text to be the transformative process of itself as opposed to the telling of a story whose truth the reader should ascertain. Michael Kohlhaas, the work that influenced Kafka most, is the process of a violent poetic textuality that has the virtually hubristic impulse of which the protagonist seems potentially guilty. In connection with other elements, this insight into the text's violent poetics allows us to see how Shakespeare's Macbeth is one of the text's precursors. Finally, "Das Urteil" can be read according to a textual process of ambivalence that underlies the story's ostensible content, an ambivalence hinging specifically on a vacillation between a sense of literary words that do nothing and a sense of those that possess a form of "absolute power."...