1 / 11

Uncanny Aesthetics in Kafka’s Amerika or The Man who D issapeared

Uncanny Aesthetics in Kafka’s Amerika or The Man who D issapeared. Ship. ‘Dreadfully large ship’ ‘Innumerable small rooms, corridors constantly branching off, short flights of stairs always followed by others. Lost in a labyrinth . Uncle’s House.

marv
Download Presentation

Uncanny Aesthetics in Kafka’s Amerika or The Man who D issapeared

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Uncanny Aesthetics in Kafka’s Amerikaor The Man who Dissapeared

  2. Ship • ‘Dreadfully large ship’ • ‘Innumerable small rooms, corridors constantly branching off, short flights of stairs always followed by others. • Lost in a labyrinth

  3. Uncle’s House • Six floors; three underground levels; two elevators; ten offices. • Process of ‘defamiliarization’. • ‘(…) and from morning to evening and amid the dreams of the night there passed along this street an incessant bustle of traffic, which looked from above like a confused, constantly self-renewing medley of distorted human shapes (…) as though a glass pane covering the street’

  4. MrPollunder’s House • ‘As only the lower part of the house was illuminated, one could not tell quite how high it was’ • ‘They suddenly heard Mr Green calling down from the top step’; ‘beginning to mount the steps’; ‘as they mounted the steps’

  5. MrPollunder’s House • ‘Made the inconvenient presence of Mr Green doubly regrettable’ • ‘The smoke from Mr Green’s cigar (…) spread through the room, carrying Green’s influence even into the corners and crannies that he himself would never enter’

  6. MrPollunder’s House • ‘The door of my room is the fourth, counting from this door, on this side of the corridor. So you go past three more doors and the one you get to then is the right one’ • ‘Lying down had already become unbearable’ • ‘Slow progress, which made the way seem twice as long’

  7. MrPollunder’s House • ‘As the corridor seemed never-ending, and no window anywhere afforded a view, Karl was already thinking that he might be going in a circle round the whole house’

  8. Freud • ‘One may, for instance, have lost one’s way in the woods, perhaps after being overtaken by gof, and, despite all one’s efforts to find a marked or familiar path, one comes back again and again to the same spot (…) Or one may be groping around the dark in an unfamiliar room, searching for the door or the light-switch and repeatedly colliding with the same piece of furniture’ (“The Uncanny”)

  9. Hotel Occidental • Thirty elevators; many rooms, dining-rooms, gaming-rooms; seven floors. • ‘all the entrances to the hotel, that is, this main entrance, the three middle entrances, and the ten side entrances, to say nothing of the innumerable small doors and exits without doors’

  10. Hotel Occidental • ‘Don’t you know that even the slightest absence from duty has to be reported in the Head Waiter’s office?’

  11. Conclusion: Freud and Kafka • ‘Unintentional return’ (“The Uncanny”) • ‘The impulsion to repeat’ • ‘Anything that can remind us of this inner compulsion to repeat is perceived as uncanny’

More Related