Franz Kafka

Live report or music-theatre production? In the piece 'Im Bau' Michel Roth plays with studio sounds and live recordings and cannot be tied down to a certain genre. Swiss composer Michel Roth adapted the text for the stage and composed the ca. one-hour monodrama 'Im Bau' (In the Burrow: Fifteen Sound Spaces after Franz Kafka) as a commission from the ensemble æquatuor, the Lucerne Festival, and the Theater Basel. The work was produced in 2017 as a music-theatrical obstacle course. The fifteen composed sound spaces interacted with a total of fifty-three real space situations, on the one hand in public partial performances, on the other under studio conditions. Likewise explored were the boundaries to reportage with participants moving through the rooms.

This book conducts a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of Franz Kafka’s relation to China. Commencing with an examination of the myriad Chinese cultural influences to which Kafka was exposed, it goes on to explore the ways in which they manifest themselves in canonical stories, such as Description of A Struggle, The Great Wall of China, and An Old Manuscript. This leads the way to thought-provoking comparative studies of Kafka and major Chinese writers and philosophers, such as Zhuang Tzu, Pu Songling, Qian Zhongshu, and Lu Xun. Highlighting kindred philosophical concepts, shared aesthetic tastes, and parallel narrative strategies, these comparisons transcend mere textual analysis, to explore the profound cultural, historical, and philosophical implications of Kafka’s works. Finally, the book turns to an examination Kafka’s impact on modern life in China, including its translation studies, literature, and even its mass culture.

On Literary Plasticity: Readings with Kafka in Ecology, Voice, and Object-Life calls to Franz Kafka, and in particular ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, for aid in charting the long reach of plastic on the human mind and world. In this book, Heather H. Yeung builds a past and future ecology of plastic, arguing that it is through a deep reading of literature that we can begin to understand more clearly what it is that plastic means to us today, asking, under the auspices of the idea of literary plasticity: what are the true depths of our twenty-first-century fascination with plastic? How did we become so entangled? How can we come to a better understanding of plastic’s role in our imagination, our environment, and our lives? What can literature teach us in this respect? Why should we care?