Abstract
The start of a close reading of Franz Kafka’s Kurzprosa ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, demonstrating plastic’s persistence in our domestic lives, its many guises and operations, material and sonorous.
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Notes
- 1.
J.A. Underwood (trans.), Franz Kafka Stories: 1904–1924 (London: Futura, 1981): 206.
- 2.
Franz Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten. Kritische Ausgabe. Ed. Wolf, Kittler et al. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1994): 282. All subsequent German quotations from the work are taken from this edition (the work appears in pp. 282–4). Unless salient to the argument, the English translations of the work will be taken from the translation by Edwin and Willa Muir, reprinted as The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1995): 495. This is in spite of the spate of recent academic translations of Kafka whose accuracy, or Kafkian Stimmung, is argued to be greater; the Muirs’s translation (Edwin, also a poet, novelist, and critic; Willa also an essayist and novelist) in the context of this work on High Modernism and literary plasticity is fitted to the period under scrutiny—this is the version of Kafka that was most widely available for many decades, and which accrued an extraordinary level of literary resonance in spite of the misprision in the translations themselves.
- 3.
Muir and Muir (trans.): 495.
- 4.
Underwood, (trans.): 206.
- 5.
Michael Hofmann (trans.), Metamorphosis and other stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007): 211–12.
- 6.
‘…kein visuelles Äquivalent für Odradek ausgemacht Werden. Er ist Sprache’. Gesa Schneider, Das Andere Schreiben: Kafka’s fotografische Poetik (Würzburg: Könignshause & Neumann, 2008): 7. My emphasis.
- 7.
Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2015): 216. Ted Geier also reads Kafkian apostrophe as a significant ‘nonhuman’ and limit-exposing aspect of the work alongside the Romantic lyric. See Geier, Kafka’s Nonhuman Form: Troubling the Boundaries of the Kafkaesque (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 10.
- 8.
Culler, Theory of the Lyric: 216.
- 9.
Anne Carson translates this with a wonderful sonorous resonance: ‘Who, O / Sappho, is wronging you?’. If not, Winter: 3.
- 10.
Werner Hamacher, ‘The Gesture in the Name: On Benjamin and Kafka’, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996): 321.
- 11.
Kevin Nolan, ‘Getting Past Odradek’, in Contemporary Poetics, ed. Louis Armand (Northwestern University Press, 2007): 43, 48.
- 12.
Jean-Claude Milner, ‘Odradek la bobine de scandale’, Elucidation 10 (2004): 93, and Slavoj Žižek, ‘Neighbours and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence’ in The Neighbour: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013): 166.
- 13.
There is an interesting echo of this prospect of re-orienting Kafka in Dimitris Vardoulakis’s recent study of humour in Kafka, as he writes of ‘Kafka’s humour [as] a response to the Western conception of freedom, which he tirelessly presents in this [sic.] narratives, and that this response implies an alternative conception of freedom’. Freedom and the Free Will: On Kafka’s Laughter (New York: SUNY UP, 2016): xiii.
- 14.
Catherine Malbou, The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy. Trans. Peter Shalfish (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011): 231.
- 15.
Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River: 70.
- 16.
Benjamin, Selected Writings v.2: 810
- 17.
J. Hillis Miller, The Conflagration of the Community: 288, n.14.
- 18.
Vivian Liske, ‘Making it Mean and Making it Matter: Modernism for the Twenty-First Century’, in Translocal Modernisms: International Perspectives, ed. Irene Ramalho Santos and António Sousa Ribero (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008): 121.
- 19.
Reinhart Göring and Johan Schimanski, ‘Sovereignty’, in Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections, ed. Johan Schimanski and Stephen F. Wolfe (New York: Berghann Books, 2017): 118.
- 20.
Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: 2. (on the ‘cute’)
- 21.
August Kleinzahler ‘Introduction’, to Christopher Middleton, Loose Cannons: Selected Prose (New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 2014): vii.
- 22.
Botha, ‘Microfiction’: 202.
- 23.
Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself: 60.
- 24.
Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas. Trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 38.
- 25.
Agamben, Stanzas: 144.
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Yeung, H.H. (2020). Odradek, or Non-biodegradable Object-Life. In: On Literary Plasticity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44158-6_2
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