I ask myself this question all the time. Haven't come up with anything worthy of an answer, which is why it's convenient that Alexander Provan does the follow-through in his piece for The Nation: "An Alienation Artist."
The most
common complaint among revisionist biographers and doting critics of
Franz Kafka is that, in the eighty-odd years since his death, the
deification of the writer has reduced his work to the level of the
aphorism. If Kafka has not yet found his way onto the walls of every
dentist's waiting room, the photograph of his stony countenance and
doleful eyes, so frequently invoked as a stand-in for his vision of the
world, sometimes seems to be everywhere else, including the cover of
novelist Louis Begley's recent book-length biographical essay on Kafka,
The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head. His stories are still
read widely--less so his novels--but have in the popular imagination
been subsumed by a one-word slogan: Kafkaesque. That grainy likeness is
its logo.
Indeed. Provan provides an interesting narrative of where Kafka and the Kafkaesque do and do not intersect. Besides being a relieving re-introduction of the human being and artist behind the brand, "An Alienation Artist" offers you plenty of pins to deflate your local moody hipster crowd.
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