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

• Authors: Sýkora Michal
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

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

• Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts, Czech Republic
• Journal: Slovo a smysl - Word & Sense
• Year: 2022
• Volume: 19
• Issue: 39
• Pages: 241-249

Contributors

author

Sýkora Michal

• Faculty of Arts, Palacký University Olomouc, Department of Theatre and Film Studies