Kafka's social discourse

Kafka’s Social Discourse An Aesthetic Search for Community Franz Kafka is among the most significant twentieth-century voices to examine the absurdity and terror posed for the individual by what his contemporary Max Weber termed “the iron cage” of society. Ferdinand Tönnies had defined the problem of finding community within society in his 1887 book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Kafka took up this issue by focusing upon the “social discourse” of human relationships. In this book the author examines Kafka’s three novels, Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle in their exploration of how community is formed or eroded in the interpersonal relations of its protagonists. Critical literature has recognized Kafka’s ability to narrate the gestural moment of alienation or communion. This “social discourse” was augmented, however, by a dimension virtually no commentator has recognized—Kafka’s conversation with past and present authors. Kafka encoded authors and their texts representing every century of the evolution of modernism and its societal problems. Kafka encoded not only past authors, but painters as well. He had been known as a graphic artist in his youth, and was informed by expression