Reviewing Political Motifs in Kafka and Kundera: A Czech Story
Keywords:
Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera, Political Motif, Communism, Velvet Revolution, Czech Literary TraditionAbstract
This paper explores political motifs in the writings of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Milan Kundera (1929). These writers although hailed from Czech ethnicity and dwelled on social and political concerns of the region, do not represent the Czech canon of literary writings. Kafka’s work is considered either among German or Austrian literary tradition and Kundera was stripped off his Czech nationality and later came to be classified under French literature. This makes an intriguing case to study as to how their incisive and often lacerating criticism of socio-political conditions in general and communist ideology in particular cost their literary fortunes in their immediate literary and academic environs.
Downloads
References
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 2001. “What is a Minor Literature” in The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2001. “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society” in The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Kafka, Franz. 1935. The Trial. (1925) Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Geneva: Heron Books,
Kundera, Milan. 1995 rpt. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) Trans. Michael Henry Heim. Croydon: Faber and Faber.
. 1991. Immortality. Trans. Peter Kussi. London: Faber and Faber.
Robertson, Ritchie. 2004. Kafka: a Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Toulmin, Stephen. 1990. Cosmopolis: the Hidden Agenda of Modernity. New York: The Free Press.