2022.1.17

>SLOVO A SMYSL 2022 (19) 39

The Reception of the Life and Work of Franz Kafka in Philip Roth’s Non-Fiction Writings

Michal Sýkora

 

 FULL TEXT   

 ABSTRACT (en)

Philip Roth made no secret of his great admiration for the work of Franz Kafka, which ultimately brought him to Prague in the 1970s and fostered his interest in Czech culture. This contribution focuses on the reception of the personality and work of Franz Kafka in Philip Roth’s non-fiction writing. The first section focuses on Roth’s essential Kafkaesque essay ‘“I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting”; or Looking at Kafka’ from 1973, in which Roth combines an empathetic portrait of his favourite author with a counterfactual vision of Kafka’s life, in which the author of the Trial and the Castle did not die of tuberculosis and instead fled from the Holocaust to the United States, where he became Roth’s uncle. In the second section, based on Roth’s dialogue with Ivan Klíma from 1990, we document how Kafka serves Roth in his reflections on the position and role of the writer in society.

 KEYWORDS (en)

Franz Kafka; Philip Roth; Ivan Klíma; American literature; Czech literature; totalitarian regime

 DOI

https://doi.org/10.14712/23366680.2022.1.17

 REFERENCES

 Primary Sources

Klíma, Ivan: Mé šílené století II. 1967–1989. Academia, Praha 2010.

Roth, Philip: Shop Talk [2001]. Vintage, London 2002.

Roth, Philip: Reading Myself and Others [1976]. Vintage, London 2007.

Roth, Philip: Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013. The Library of America, New

 Secondary Sources

Brauner, David: Philip Roth. Manchester University Press, Manchester — New York 2007.

Gooblar, David: The Major Phases of Philip Roth. Continuum, London — New York 2011.

Kosík, Karel: Hašek a Kafka neboli Groteskní svět. In: Jiří Trávníček (ed.): V kleštích dějin. Střední Evropa jako pojem a problém [1963]. Host, Brno 2009, pp. 132–141.

Miller Budick, Emily: Roth and Israel. In: Timothy Parrish (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007, pp. 68–81.

Parker Royal, Derek: Roth, Literary Influence, and Postmodernism. In: Timothy Parrish (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007, pp. 22–34.

Parrish, Timothy: Introduction: Roth at Mid-Career. In idem (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007, pp. 1–8.

Roth Pierpont, Claudia: Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2013.

Sýkora, Michal: The Prague Orgy: The Life of Writers in a Totalitarian State According to Philip Roth. Humanities 8, 2019, no. 2, p. 71 https://doi.org/10.3390/h8020071 [20. 6. 2021].

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