Description
This analysis is about the special reading experience deriving from the interplay of bottom-up and top-down processes in the reception of Kafka’s narrative texts. Text phenomena which are typical for the author (and therefore kafkaesque) are being analysed in “The Worries of a Family Man” and in his three novels.
The special effect of these kafkaesque peculiarities on readers is made tangible primarily with the help of Wolfgang Iser’s Leerstellentheorie and cognitive poetics. In a comparison of the novels, the first fragment, “Amerika or The Missing” Person offers significantly fewer Kafka-typical features than the last fragment, “The Castle”. It can also be demonstrated on the basis of individual passages from different texts with similar subject matter that the narrators of the novels are becoming better and better at making it more difficult for the reader to create meaning based on what they are reading. This difficulty in the construction of meaning arises on the level of the situation model: the descriptions of what is given within the narrative cannot be reconciled with the schemata that people adopt in the course of their lives based on the experiences they have made.
The process of understanding, which usually occurs automatically when reading a text, is being deautomated because the reader is overwhelmed by the narrator’s schemas; depending on the text on a more general or detailed level. This specific quality of Kafka’s texts is Kafkaesque.
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