Journal Article

A Common Misconception

Grady, Wayne

2020

Overview

[...]no one is able to say exactly where A's village is in relation to H. Last week, A had a job interview with an employer, let us call him B, in the town of H. A took the bus to H and arrived there ten minutes later, had the interview with B, and returned home, also by bus, also in ten minutes. [...]of his death, in 1924 at the age of 40, Kafka was being treated for laryngeal tuberculosis in the Kierling Sanatorium, outside Vienna, but from 1908 until his retirement in 1922, he had been employed in Prague by the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, first investigating industrial accidents and assessing claims by workers who had been injured on the job, and eventually as a senior clerk in charge of the division studying the prevention of workplace accidents. What he calls into question, rather, is the convention that the laws of nature are at all times to be observed in fiction ... Since the 1920s, the usual conventions of storytelling have been called into question so often, by authors of diverse cultural backgrounds, that we might ask whose conventions Kafka was flouting? [...]have Western literature and Western society in general come from those early conventions that we no longer consider their suspension to be shocking or even particularly innovative.

• Publisher: Queen's Quarterly
• Subject: Bureaucracy / Buses / Conventions / Criticism and interpretation / Cultural differences / Employment interviews / Fiction / Kafka, Franz / Kafka, Franz (1883-1924) / Laryngology / Storytelling