delit1-8, Exercise 1: Kafka and "Kafkaesque"

Model answer (check the details):

What is distinctive: Kafka writes in a plain, exact, almost official prose about extraordinary events. In The Metamorphosis a man wakes as an insect and the story deals with the practical consequences. In The Trial and The Castle ordinary people face courts and offices whose rules they cannot grasp. The effect combines nightmare, comedy and precise detail. His themes include guilt, authority, family and isolation.

Why "Kafkaesque" can mislead: in English the word has come to mean any absurd bureaucracy or nightmare, which loses the humour (his friends reportedly laughed when he read aloud), the exact style, the Prague and Jewish setting, and the specific family pressures in the work. It also treats the writer as a label and not as someone who wrote particular stories.

Also note: his novels are unfinished and were published after death by Max Brod against Kafka's request that they be burned, so editions differ.