Approaches to Teaching Kafka's Short Fiction
Editor(s): Richard T. Gray
Pages: xiv & 161 pp.
Published: 1995
ISBN: 9780873527255
We are currently out of stock of the paperback edition of this title. The cloth edition will be substituted at the paperback price.
Ever since English-speaking readers "discovered" Kafka in the 1950s, his works have been a cornerstone of undergraduate world literature studies. Hoping to make Kafka and the modernist writing he represents more accessible to students, the editor and twelve contributors to this volume explain how they present "one of the most taught and least understood writers of our century."
The book, like others in the MLA Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. Part 1, "Materials," surveys resources useful for classroom instruction, such as dual-language editions, critical studies, reference works, and audiovisual aids. Part 2, "Approaches," comprises thirteen essays that focus on ways to teach five of Kafka's stories--"The Judgment," The Metamorphosis, "In the Penal Colony," "A Country Doctor," and "A Hunger Artist"--and also provide strategies for teaching Kafka's other works of short fiction. The approaches described include teaching Kafka as a modernist writer, reading Kafka in a second-year German course, studying the stories alongside the expressionist film classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and examining Kafka's treatment of his female characters. Intended for those who teach Kafka in translation or in the original, Approaches to Teaching Kafka's Short Fiction presents fresh ideas that have been tested and refined by experienced instructors.
Table of Contents
Approaches to Teaching Kafka's Short Fiction
PART 1: MATERIALS
Richard T. Gray
- Editions and Translations
- German Editions
- Dual-Language Editions
- Translations
- The Instructor's Library
- Bibliographies and Reference Works
- Background and Bibliographical Studies
- Critical Studies
- Didactic Approaches
- Student Readings
- Background and Bibliographical Studies
- Critical Studies
Aids to Teaching
PART 2: APPROACHES
Literary and Historical Contexts
Kafka and Modernism
Walter H. Sokel
Gender, Judaism, and Power: A Jewish Feminist Approach to Kafka
Evelyn Torton Beck
Kafka's "An Imperial Message" in a Comparative Context
Judith Ryan
Classroom Strategies
From Caligari to Kafka: Expressionist Film and the Teaching of Kafka's Short Fiction
Richard T. Gray
Teaching Kafka in the Second-Year German Course
Joseph L. Brockington
Thematic and Aesthetic Issues
Kafka and Women
Ruth V. Gross
The Language of Defamiliarization: Benjamin's Kafka
Carrie L. Asman
A Psychoanalytic Approach to "The Judgment"
Kenneth Hughes
Pedagogical and Interpretive Perspectives on Individual Texts
Georg Bendemann's Path to the Judgment
Elizabeth W. Trahan
Kafka's The Metamorphosis and the Search for Meaning in Twentieth-Century German Literature
Margit M. Sinka
Irony, Contingency, and Postmodernity: "In the Penal Colony"
Steven Taubeneck
The Text That Was Never a Story: Symmetry and Disaster in "A Country Doctor"
Henry Sussman
Purification unto Death: "A Hunger Artist" as Allegory of Modernism
James Rolleston
Works Cited
Index
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