Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine adds an original critical framework to the work begun by Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner in their monumental collection Franz Kafka: The Office Writings (2008). It is widely acknowledged that Kafkas daytime occupation as a specialist in industrial accident insurance contributed in a significant way to his fiction. Corngold and Wagner frame Kafkas writings as cultural events, each work reflecting the economic and cultural discourses of his epoch. In pursuing Kafkas avowed interest in the theory and practice of insurance, the authors view the two systems of his literary worldsthe official and the personalas a bundling together of the various cultural accidents of Kafkas time. The work of two of the leading scholars of the single most influential writer of literary modernity, Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine constitutes a breathtakingly original advance in the study of both the more famous and less well-known works of this enigmatic master.