Parables, Part 4: Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes

About this course:

In the little-known Parables and Paradoxes, Franz Kafka re-examines and reimagines some basic mythical tales of the Hebrew, Greek, and Western cultural tradition, as well as creations of his own imagination. In this course, we read these short works, which were posthumously gathered from Kafka's notebooks, diaries, letters, and short stories. For example, Kafka speculates, in his richly witty and trenchant way, on other possible versions of “The Coming of the Messiah;” he transforms Poseidon, the Greek god of the seas, into a cranky bureaucrat always too busy with his bookkeeping to inspect his oceans; and he develops his own unique parables about such figures as Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s sidekick, and Robinson Crusoe. W.H. Auden called Kafka “a great, perhaps the greatest, master of the parable,” and Kafka's modern sensibility mirrors our own misgivings about our world and how we understand it.