FROM DEFEAT TO RESILIENCE: THE HUMAN COCKROACH IN WORLD LITERATURE AFTER KAFKA

• Authors: Arnds Peter
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Through a selection of literary texts featuring cockroaches in the wake of Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis (1915): Clarice Lispector’s A paixão segundo G.H. (1964; The Passion According to G.H., 1988), Marc Estrin’s Insect Dreams: The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa (2002), Scholastique Mukasonga’s Inyenzi ou les Cafards (2006; Cockroaches, 2016), and Rawi Hage’s Cockroach (2008), this article shows how these authors politicize the cockroach as a bestia sacra between trauma and resilience. These literary works are exemplary in demonstrating how Anthropocene fiction resists and destabilizes bio-politically charged species metaphors with their dehumanizing agency. How do these authors, in writing beyond Kafka’s doomed human cockroach, liberate the species blattodae from its aura of dehumanization and draw on the resilience of this ancient species in the face of adversity and as a model for human agency?

Keywords

EN

BESTIA SACRA; FRANZ KAFKA; COCKROACH; TRAUMA; RESILIENCE

• Publisher: Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: World Literature Studies
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 15
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 56 – 65

Contributors

author

Arnds Peter

• Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin, College Green, Dublin, Ireland

• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4137-3423

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/WLS.2023.15.2.5