In der Sprachkolonie: Franz Kafka's world and the limits of language

It is often our goal to ask what Kafka's works "mean." I investigate instead how he conceives the relationship between language and meaning altogether. For the inhabitants of Kafka's fictional universes use language in a way that forces into question the conceit of linguistic expression itself. To argue this I turn to writers beyond those we normally associate with the Austrian Sprachkrise of the turn of the 20th Century. Texts dealing directly and primarily with language consciousness, such as Hofmannsthal's Ein Brief and Rilke's Duineser Elegien, certainly challenge referential theories of linguistic expression of aesthetic or ethical truth. But in Kafka, failure of referential meaning is the precondition for his best-known dramatic conflicts---conflicts that do not, at first, even appear to be about language (Josef K.'s seemingly-juridical predicament in Der Prozess, for example). In my first chapter, I show that without the analytic language philosophy preceding and during the Sprachkrise, our rendering of Kafka's unique dramatizations of the crisis of expression remains incomplete.;In my second chapter, I uncover links between narrative representations of meaning, truth and ambiguity in Der Prozess and the language philosophy of Gottlob Frege, without whose work the Sprachkrise's major intellects would have been lacking systematic precedent; in my third, I move on to the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and explore the "limits of language" as they are reached and confronted in both the Tractatus logico-philosophicus and Kafka's Die Verwandlung ; in my fourth and final chapter, I demonstrate a common current between the Officer's fate in Kafka's Strafkolonie and the paradoxes of ostensive definition and rule-following as "played" in the language-games of Wittgenstein's Philosophische Untersuchungen. Through the development of these chapters I show how several of the most radical ideas of early analytic language philosophy emerge in Kafka's fictional worlds, and thereby demonstrate themselves with an urgency and immediacy unavailable to the philosophical medium. In this way I also show that a study of the analytic tradition is necessary for the richest possible understanding of Kafka's place in the Sprachkrise.