On edge with Franz Kafka's short prose: Exposing the dynamic movement between text and reader

This dissertation argues that the semi-openness of Kafka's short fiction is a “live-literary” performance, an intersection of perspectives whose playfulness signals a resistance to literary representation. It also argues that the fiction has a peculiarly unsettling effect precisely because such resistance is little more than a whisper. In fact, the resistance in Kafka's fiction reveals itself as a hesitation, a propensity, a mood that comes into being when the relation between “sense” and the “senses” is unraveled and nerves are touched, in short through the reader's own sensibilities.;Kafka's fiction thus calls for a particular understanding, an oblique perspective that is open to a primary layer of sense experience: “seeing” the margins of representation reveals the “life” in the cracks between words.;In pursuit of the mood, sensibility and dynamic of Kafka's short fiction, this dissertation follows a dual trajectory: Seeking to preserve the obliqueness and “unfinished” character of its subject, it exposes the dynamic shift between Kafka's fiction and the reader—the process of a literary opening.;Chapter One traces journeys in “Ein Landarzt” (“A Country Doctor”) and “Der Jäger Gracchus” (“Hunter Gracchus”) whose circular structures reveal the “blindness” of a singular perspective and thus engage the reader's dual vision, that of distance and closeness.;Chapter Two explores how Kafka's Briefe an Milena ( Letters to Milena) and “Forschungen eines Hundes” (“Investigations of a Dog”) address the tension around “truth” and in approaching the preliterary begin to make a space for the reader.;Chapter Three elaborates how such a space is dramatized by Josefine in “Josefine die Sängerin oder das Volk der Muse” (“Josefine the Singer or the Mousefolk”) whose dual performance reflects a humanist and ideological order and at the same time anticipates the reader's “real” performance beyond the mastery of any order.;Chapter Four demonstrates how the porous narrative construction of “Der Bau” (“The Burrow”) challenges the reader to experience not only the collapse of structures—a vortical experience—but also its potentially liberating effect.