/lit/ - Literature

>>12756719
A lot of ((())) on that list. Really makes one ponder.

Dubliners>Portrait
Please tell me Stephen stops being a tool he reminds me of a younger me.

intro needs some work

The galvanizing stories of Franz Kafka have inspired legions of readers and writers, from the likes of existentialist Albert Camus to the magical realists Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez. With a legacy resting primarily on unfinished novels and a smattering of robust short stories, Kafka’s enduring impact may seem a bit peculiar to the uninitiated. Yet his well-founded primacy has its basis in his magical ability of grasping emotional states with the feverish lucidity of dreams. Two of Kafka’s crucial works, The Trial and The Castle, excavate vivid impressions of loneliness and alienation in the face of society and its crushing sovereignty. These two novels share another prevailing element, perhaps more unitive than any other: bureaucracy. With all its supposed rationality, order, stability, and normality, bureaucracy manifests as a transcendent unit of dysfunction in the worlds of The Trial and The Castle. Kafka’s low-level employee status at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute in the Kingdom of Bohemia (present-day Czech Republic) certainly exercised a profound effect on his writings. Without plunging into a dry and exaggerated investigation on the definite links between Kafka’s personal life and his works, one can say--in summation--that the managerial machinations, bureaucratic façades, and worker’s suffering he attended to are unmistakable in the picture of bureaucracy portrayed in The Trial and The Castle.
Max Weber’s bureaucracy serves as an ideal comparison for Kafka’s nightmarish vision of society as it remains one of the most common scholarly frameworks used to examine societal organizations. Whatever inherent shortcomings Weberian bureaucracy contains, it represents a perfect counterpoint to Kafka’s system, particularly with its emphasis on rationality and legality. Evolving from traditional structures, such as feudalism and monarchism, Weberian bureaucracy established 1.) clearly specified jurisdictional areas, 2.) hierarchal organizations of authority, 3.) stable, comprehensive rules governing decisions, 4.) separation between personal property and official property, 5.) official selection based on technical qualifications, not elections, and 6.) the promise of a life-long career through employment by the organization (Weber 956-58). Weber’s model bureaucracy was one based on discipline in which leaders of organizations exercised power and control over others. A dominant concern for Weber was maintaining control over expanding bureaucracies--he believed the most serious issue was the increased authority of civic officials. While this problem certainly crops up in Kafka’s novels, inefficiency becomes the focal point his commentary.

Leisure is gone – gone where the spinning-sheels rae gone, and the pack horses, and the slow wagons,
and the pedlars, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons. Ingenious philosophers tell you,
perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them: it
only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now – eager for amusement:
prone to excursion-trains, art-museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels: prone even to scientific
theorizing, and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage: he only
read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call
post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellenet digestion – of quiet
perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis: happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the
things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond
of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall, and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning
sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were
falling. He knew nothing of the weekday services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it
allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing – liking the afternoon service best, because the prayers
were the shortes, and not ashamed to say so; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad-backed like
himself, and able to carry a great deal of peer or port-wine, -- not being made squeamish by doubts and
qualms and lofty aspirations. Life was not a talk to him, but a sinecure: he fingered the guineas in his
pocket , and ate his dinners, and slept the sleep of the irresponsible; for had he not kept up his character
by going to church on the Sunday afternoons?
Fine old Leisure! Do not be severe upon him, and judge him by our modern standard: he never
went to Exeter Hall, or heard a popular preacher, or read Tracts for the Times or Sartor Resartus.