Kafka
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- Category: English: Novels
- Date Submitted: 09/14/2011 08:53 AM
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Surrealist author Franz Kafka’s "The Trial" and 20th Century Philosophy/Psychology
Kafka's The Trial: Conveying Modern Ideologies....
By the dawning of the twentieth century, a multitude of emerging scientific and philosophical ideologies were threatening to undermine the previously assumed solidity of rationality in everyday life. Thinkers were beginning to take up a brave exploration of the inner world of the mind with all of its irrational and, occasionally, frightening ramifications. It was within such an atmosphere that Franz Kafka, a Jewish employee at an insurance company, drafted his book, The Trial, a frightening look at the life of a man living under the pretext of anonymous guilt in a seemingly topsy-turvy world (Kafka, 268).
Though a piece of fiction, Kafka's work deals extensively with many of the predominant topics of scientists and philosophers contemporaneous with himself. In The Trial, Kafka presents readers with an absurd and surreal world prior to the cultural recognition in theatre and art of the later forms of "absurdism" and "surrealism." As perhaps two of the most widely recognized and influential cultural movements to result from the currents of thought surfacing around the turn of the century, it might be more correct to ally Kafka with the forefathers of these ideologies, namely "existentialist" philosophy and "psychoanalysis." It was Kafka's gift to be able to present the reader with the results of an application of these theoretical systems to everyday life, as in The Trial.
Prior to the turn of the century, artists and philosophers had left behind the rigidly structured, enlightenment-oriented ideals of Neo-classicism in favor of the emotionally-charged, subjectively-oriented Romantic movement around the beginning of the nineteenth century. Though this move towards subjectivity and exploration of the inner self took hold of the art world first (with painters and poets such as William Blake,...
Kafka's The Trial: Conveying Modern Ideologies....
By the dawning of the twentieth century, a multitude of emerging scientific and philosophical ideologies were threatening to undermine the previously assumed solidity of rationality in everyday life. Thinkers were beginning to take up a brave exploration of the inner world of the mind with all of its irrational and, occasionally, frightening ramifications. It was within such an atmosphere that Franz Kafka, a Jewish employee at an insurance company, drafted his book, The Trial, a frightening look at the life of a man living under the pretext of anonymous guilt in a seemingly topsy-turvy world (Kafka, 268).
Though a piece of fiction, Kafka's work deals extensively with many of the predominant topics of scientists and philosophers contemporaneous with himself. In The Trial, Kafka presents readers with an absurd and surreal world prior to the cultural recognition in theatre and art of the later forms of "absurdism" and "surrealism." As perhaps two of the most widely recognized and influential cultural movements to result from the currents of thought surfacing around the turn of the century, it might be more correct to ally Kafka with the forefathers of these ideologies, namely "existentialist" philosophy and "psychoanalysis." It was Kafka's gift to be able to present the reader with the results of an application of these theoretical systems to everyday life, as in The Trial.
Prior to the turn of the century, artists and philosophers had left behind the rigidly structured, enlightenment-oriented ideals of Neo-classicism in favor of the emotionally-charged, subjectively-oriented Romantic movement around the beginning of the nineteenth century. Though this move towards subjectivity and exploration of the inner self took hold of the art world first (with painters and poets such as William Blake,...