Kafka's Travels

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

   PDF

2. Introduction Kafka’s Travels?

   • John Zilcosky

   Pages 1-18

3. Transcending the Exotic: Nostalgia, Exoticism, and Kafka’s Early Travel Novel, Richard and Samuel

   • John Zilcosky

   Pages 19-39

4. The “America” Novel: Learning How to Get Lost

   • John Zilcosky

   Pages 41-70

5. Traveling at Home: The Trial and the Exotic Heimat

   • John Zilcosky

   Pages 71-102

6. Savage Travel: Sadism and Masochism in Kafka’s Penal Colony

   • John Zilcosky

   Pages 103-121

7. Of Sugar Barons and Land Surveyors: Colonial Visions in Schaffstein’s Little Green Books and The Castle

   • John Zilcosky

   Pages 123-151

8. The Traffic of Writing: Technologies of Intercourse in the Letters to Milena

   • John Zilcosky

   Pages 153-173

9. Travel, Death, and the Exotic Voyage Home: “The Hunter Gracchus”

   • John Zilcosky

   Pages 175-189

10. Epilogue Kafka’s Final Journey

    • John Zilcosky

    Pages 191-199

11. Back Matter

    Pages 201-289

    PDF

In 1916, Kafka writes of The Sugar Baron , a dime-store colonial adventure novel, '[it] affects me so deeply that I feel it is about myself, or as if it were the book of rules for my life.' John Zilcosky reveals that this perhaps surprising statement - made by the Prague-bound poet of modern isolation - is part of a network of remarks that exemplify Kafka's ongoing preoccupation with popular travel writing, exoticism, and colonial fantasy. Taking this biographical peculiarity as a starting point, Kafka's Travels elegantly re-reads Kafka's major works ( Amerika , The Trial , The Castle ) through the lens of fin-de siecle travel culture. Making use of previously unexplored literary and cultural materials - travel diaries, train schedules, tour guides, adventure novels - Zilcosky argues that Kafka's uniquely modern metaphorics of alienation emerges out of the author's complex encounter with the utopian travel discourses of his day.

• America
• argue
• colonialism
• culture
• death
• discourse
• Franz Kafka
• metaphor
• novel
• poet
• utopia
• writing

'[T]here is much to be said for [Zilcosky's] new, postcolonial Kafka.' - Times Literary Supplement

JOHN ZILCOSKY teaches German and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, Canada. He has published articles on Kafka, Schopenhauer, Paul Auster, Botho Strauss, and literary theory.

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