Hammer E. (Ed.) Kafka’s The Trial: Philosophical Perspectives

Oxford University Press, 2019. — xviii+290 p. — (Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature). — ISBN: 978-0-19-046145-4."The Trial", written from 1914 to 1915 and published in 1925, is a multifaceted, notoriously difficult manifestation of European literary modernism. Written in a relatively abstract language, it tells the story of Josef K., who is accused of a crime he has no recollection of having committed (and whose nature is never revealed to him). The novel has often been interpreted theologically, expressing a form of radical nihilism in a modern world abandoned by God. However, it has just as often been read as a parable of the cold, inhumane rationality of modern bureaucratization. Like many other novels of this turbulent period, it offers a tragic quest-narrative in which the hero’s search for truth and clarity (about himself, his alleged guilt, and the anonymous system he is facing) progressively leads to greater and greater confusion, ending with his execution. In this volume, the contributors deal with a range of issues arising in this work. Theology is central, and related to that are questions of justice, law, ethics, resistance, and subjectivity. All the contributors view the novel as responding to a context of rapid modernization, and questions of metaphysics intersect with the most mundane challenges of everyday life. There is here a fundamental uncertainty, a context of skepticism, that the contributors approach from a variety of angles.Introduction. Espen Hammer
Kafka’s Inverse Theology. Peter E. Gordon
Before the Law. Fred Rush
On the Ethical Character of Literature. John Gibson
"A Disease of All Signification". Gerhard Richter
Unfettering the Future. Iain Macdonald
The Trouble with Time. Anne Fuchs
Judges, Heathscapes, and Hazardous Quarries. Howard Caygill
Kafka’s Modernism. Espen Hammer
Displacements on a Pathless Terrain. Elizabeth S. Goodstein