New essays by leading scholars on the most perplexing of modern writers, Franz Kafka. No other 20th-century writer of German-language literature has been as fully accepted into the canon of world literature as Franz Kafka. The unsettlingly, enigmatically surreal world of Kafka's novels and stories continues to fascinate readers and critics of each new generation, who in turn continue to find new readings. One thing has become clear: although all theories attempt to appropriate Kafka, there is no one key to his work. The challenge to criticshas been to present a strong point of view while taking account of previous Kafka research, a challenge that has been met by the contributors to this volume. Contributors: James Rolleston, Clayton Koelb, Walter H. Sokel, Judith Ryan, Russel A. Berman, Ritchie Robertson, Henry Sussman, Stanley Corngold, Bianca Theisen, Rolf J. Goebel, Richard T. Gray, Ruth V. Gross, Sander L. Gilman, John Zilcosky, Mark Harman James Rolleston is Professor Emeritus of German at Duke University.

New essays on the most prominent German dramatist and short-story writer of the early 19th century. For over 150 years, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) has been one of the most widely read and performed German authors. His status in the literary canon is firmly established, but he has always been one of Germany's most contentiously discussed authors. Today's critical debate on his unique prose narratives and dramas is as heated as ever. Many critics regard Kleist as a lone presager of the aesthetics and philosophies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernism. Yet there can be no question that he responds in his works and letters to the philosophical, aesthetic, and political debates of his time. During the last thirty years, the scholarship on Kleist's work and life has departed from the existentialist wave of the 1950s and early 1960s and opened up new avenues for coming to terms with his unusual talent. The present volume brings together the most important and innovative of these newer scholarly approaches: the essays include critically informed, up-to-date interpretations of Kleist's most-discussed stories and dramas. Other contributions analyze Kleist's literary means and styles and their theoretical underpinnings. They include articles on Kleist's narrative and theatrical technique, poetic and aesthetic theory, philosophical and political thought, and insights from new biographical research. Contributors: Jeffrey L. Sammons,Jost Hermand, Anthony Stephens, Bianca Theisen, Hinrich C. Seeba, Bernhard Greiner, Helmut J. Schneider, Tim Mehigan, Susanne Zantop, Hilda M. Brown, and Sean Allan. Bernd Fischer is Professor of German and Head of theDepartment of German at Ohio State University.

A collection of essays examining the influence of Kant on Heinrich von Kleist. The great and eccentric German writer Heinrich von Kleist, famous for his enigmatic dramas and novellas, read the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1801. A series of letters written around this time speak of the distresshe felt as he absorbed the implications of Kantian thought. This sense of distress -- long considered important to understanding Kleist's subsequent works -- has become known to Kleist scholars as the 'Kant crisis,' and marks Kleist's abandonment of the hope of gaining metaphysical certainty about his life. But it has never been established which texts of Kant Kleist actually read, how well he understood them, and why they precipitated such despair. Kleisthimself -- aside from one paraphrasing of Kant in a letter of 1801 -- was never explicit about what he called this 'sad philosophy.' Yet the distress seems never to have left him and remains an abiding preoccupation throughout his dramas and stories. This collection of essays, all in German language, represents the most recent work of prominent scholars in the field. It takes the pervasive sense of metaphysical crisis in Kleist's works as a startingpoint. In the context of Kleist's response to Kant, the essays deal with his subversive treatment of the literary motifs and genres of his day, and with the ambiguity of truth in his works -- for his characters and readers alike.In tracing the source of crisis to specific writings of Kant and to other Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau and Wieland, the essays show Kleist's complex dialogue with the Enlightenment to be an important new approach to understanding this notoriously difficult writer. Tim Mehigan is Professor of German in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

In response to the silence that continues to shroud Austria's historical past, Austrian literature after 1950 wants to retrace an untold history that left its marks in mental schemata and cultural cliches. The question how literature can refer to the facts silenced by a political unconscious, the question of literary reference and reality description, lies at the core of Austrian literature since the 1950's. This book traces the development of contemporary Austrian fiction from the 1950s to the 1990s, showing how the Vienna Group's literary reductionism led to gesture of mere pointing in happening and performance. While strongly indebted to the experimental techniques of the Vienna Group, later Austrian authors such as Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Peter Rosei, and Gerhard Roth employ literary forms and extra-literary media prone to the indexical in an attempt to cut through the net of linguistic and cultural cliches, alluding to the microfascisms latent in common percepts, and indexing a reality that eludes plain description.