APHORISM AND MET-APHORISM: THE APHORISTIC TRADITION AND THE APHORISMS OF FRANZ KAFKA

Literary critics have commonly taken Franz Kafka's aphorisms to be religious or philosophical texts. In such instances the aphorisms are viewed as objective, "truthful" statements containing the opinions and beliefs of the person/writer Franz Kafka, and as such they often become the underpinnings for critical interpretations of Kafka's works. This dissertation takes issue with the validity of such an approach to the aphorisms and seeks to demonstrate that these pieces must be approached as literary texts which conform to certain rules of structure and form, and which take their proper place in an extensive literary tradition.;This central argument of the thesis is developed in various stages. The first step is an analysis of the tradition of the aphorism in the German language, including an intellectual-historical investigation into the development of aphoristic modes of expression in Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second step constitutes an examination of the use of aphoristic forms by Kafka's Austrian contemporaries, citing the apparent prominence which this literary form enjoyed among Austrian intellectuals at this time, and outlining the intellectual and social conditions responsible for this phenemenon. The third part of the thesis presents an exploration into the connections of Franz Kafka's modes of thought to those typical of the literary aphorist, documenting Kafka's concrete connections to the tradition of the aphorism (Friedrich Hebbel's diaries, Pascal's Pensees, the works of Kierkegaard, Kafka's interest in Karl Kraus). The fourth step is an analysis of the forms and structures typical of Kafka's aphorisms, relating these forms to those which are traditionally a part of aphoristic expression, and citing the peculiarities of Kafka's aphoristic style. Finally, the dissertation deals with questions of chronology in Kafka's creative life, defining the time span from January 1917 to fall of 1920 as Kafka's "aphoristic" phase. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of school.) UMI.