Tag Archives: Kafka

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By Jessie | Published: July 7, 2009 Leave a comment
We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would [...]
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Love letter

By Jessie | Published: February 10, 2009 Leave a comment
11 November, 1912 Fräulein Felice! I am now going to ask you a favor which sounds quite crazy, and which I should regard as such, were I the one to receive the letter. It is also the very greatest test that even the kindest person could be put to. Well, this is it: Write to me only once [...]
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What we need…

By Jessie | Published: November 25, 2008 Leave a comment
“What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within [...]
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Derrida on Ghosts

By Jessie | Published: November 24, 2008 Leave a comment
Derrida On ‘Ghostly Hauntings’ … And Kafka’s ‘Ghost’ “In these two clips from Ken McMullen’s improvisational ‘Ghost Dance’ (1983), Jacques Derrida describes an ‘unnatural’ ghostly haunting whereby the dead are taken into us, but they are not internalized as they would be under more ‘normal’ circumstances (a psychoanalytic view of mourning) – he labels this as [...]
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Up in the Gallery

By Jessie | Published: November 23, 2008 Leave a comment
“…since a beautiful woman, in white and red, flies in through curtains which proud men in livery open in front of her, since the director, devotedly seeking her eyes, breathes in her direction, behaving like an animal, and, as a precaution, lifts her up on the dapple-gray horse, as if she were his grand daughter, [...]
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By Jessie | Published: October 6, 2008 Leave a comment
“For me, a [single] frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny… Nor to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the extraordinary power of his stories. […] What Kafka’s stories have, rather, is a grotesque and gorgeous [...]
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Franz Kafka, "A Hunger Artist"

By Jessie | Published: June 6, 2008 Leave a comment
Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist” One of my favorite short stories.
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Give It Up

By Jessie | Published: December 29, 2007 Leave a comment
“It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my way to the railroad station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realized it was already much later than I had thought, I had to hurry, the shock of this discovery made me feel uncertain of [...]
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