Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka's Cages [Hardcover]

Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in modernity. Rather, it provides a new reading of imprisonment suggesting it allows Kafka to perform a critique of a modernity instead.Kafka's Cages: An Introduction - Kiarina Kordela and Dimitris Vardoulakis * PART 1: Interpreting Kafka's Cages * Special Views on Kafka's Cages - Stanley Corngold * Delusions of Agency: Kafka, Imprisonment, and Modern Victimhood - Chris Fleming and John O'Carroll * Kafka and Derrida Before the Laws - Howard Caygill * PART 2: Reconceptualizations of Kafka's Cages * Kafka's Cage - John Mowitt * 'The Fall is the proof of our freedom'': Mediated Freedom in Kafka - Dimitris Vardoulakis * 'Workforce without Possessions': Kafka, 'Social Justice,' and the Word Religion - Peter Fenves * Kafkaesque: (Secular) Kabbalah and Allegory - A. Kiarina Kordela * The Ethics and Beauty of The Trial: Kafka's Circumscription of Failure - Ross Shields * PART 3: Performatives of Kafka's Cages * Kafka's Fatal Performatives: Between 'Bad Conscience' and Betrayed Vulnerability - Karyn Ball * How Is the Trapeze Possible? - Christophe Bident * With Impunity - Henry Sussman

'Focusing on one of Kafka's crucial problem images the cage, the prisoner, the question of imprisonment, escape, and freedom Freedom and Confinement in Modernity does away with the misleading conception of imprisonment as lack of freedom. Instead, it combines a rich variety of approaches to unfold the cage as agent of cultural productivity and of literature itself. This volume provides a shining example of collaboration between philosophy, cultural studies, and literary theory.' - Benno Wagner, Professor, Siegen University, Germany

'The essays collected in Freedom and Confinement in Modernity set out to pursue a novel approach to Kafka's world. The focus on the figure of the 'cl33