Kafka's Creatures

Marc Lucht is visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Donna Yarri is associate professor of theology at Alvernia University.

• Chapter 1. IntroductionChapter 2. Kafka's Hybrids: Thinking Animals and Mirrored HumansChapter 3. "Czechs, Jews and Dogs Not Allowed": Identity, Boundary and Moral Stance in Kafka's "A Crossbreed" and "Jackals and Arabs"Chapter 4. De-allegorizing Kafka's Ape: Two Animalistic ContextsChapter 5. Agents of the Forgotten: Animals as the Vehicles of Shame in KafkaChapter 6. The Difficult Task of Being Real: Odradek, the Kittenlamb, and the Historical IndividualChapter 7. Consolation in Your Neighbour's Fur: On Kafka's Animal ParablesChapter 8. Crowds, Animals, and Aesthetic Language in Kafka's "Josephine"Chapter 9. Performative Emotion in Kafka's "Josephine, the Singer; or, the Mouse Folk" and Freud's "The Creative Writer and Daydreamer"Chapter 10. The Power of the Look: Franz Kafka's "The Cares of a Family Man"Chapter 11. Four Hands Good, Two Hands BadChapter 12. Who identified the animal? The rhetoric behind the hybrid in Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" and Amerika (The man who disappeared)Ch

Kafka's affinity and empathy for animals led him to write numerous tales in which the central characters are thinking animals, human-animal hybrids, or fantastic creatures. These tales have traditionally been interpreted allegorically, as fables that reduce the human condition to its basic, enigmatic features. Lucht (philosophy, Virginia Tech) and Yarri (theology, Alvernia Univ.) have gathered suggestive, insightful critical analyses (representing a diversity of approaches) that for the most part challenge this allegorical assumption about Kafka's creatures. In treating Kafka's animal stories more as stories about animals, the contributors not so much overthrow the time-honored allegory assumption but augment it by exploring Kafka's provocative blurring of the boundaries between species and creatures. At its best, the volume sheds light on Kafka's subversion of anthropocentric prejudices and sociocultural values, thus generating new perspectives on his meditations on power, guilt and history, Jewish identity, and the alienating, dehumanizing forces of the modern/postmodern world. And in elaborating the narrative stance and creaturely perspectives of these tales, these essays elucidate ways in which Kafka anticipated study of ethnicity, non-human subjectivity, and animal rights. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.