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Web End = Neophilologus (2015) 99:449464
DOI 10.1007/s11061-014-9426-0
Stijn De Cauwer
Published online: 18 January 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract Johannes Trk has argued that literature can function as an immunity mechanism, using the writings of Kafka as an example. Trk, however, theorizes immunity as a personal, individual coping strategy against ones own mortal sickness and death. In this view, strongly inuenced by Luhmanns systems theory, literature has the capacity of providing us with an emotional skill set. The view that immunity mechanisms are a personal skill set leads to inevitable difculties and limits our understanding of the functioning of a literary immunity. Kafkas texts were written in a context in which problematic and destructive discourses about immunity were prevailing. By focusing on Kafkas story Beim Bau der Chinesis-chen Mauer as an exploration of the problems with immunity discourse, I show that the different stylistic features of Kafkas writing function as tactics to render destructive immunity discourses inoperative.
Keywords Franz Kafka Immunity Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer Literary
tactics Niklas Luhmann
Introduction
In the beginning of the book on his Berlin childhood, Walter Benjamin (1987) claimed that the writing of his childhood memories was comparable to an inoculation with homesickness (9). By infecting himself, as it were, with a limited dose of an afiction which he can manage and elaborate in his writings, Benjamin constructs an immunologic technique that can help him face future, more virulent outbreaks of that afiction during his exile from Germany. In Die Immunitat der Literatur and Rituals of Dying, Burrows of Anxiety in Freud, Proust, and Kafka:
S. De Cauwer (&)
University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgiume-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
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Web End = Tearing Down the Wall: Franz Kafkaand the Possibility of a Literary Immunity
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450 S. De Cauwer
Prolegomena to a Critical Immunology, Johannes Trk argues that Benjamins statement is exemplary for a cultural technique that is of paramount importance to modernity (2007a, 143). According to Trk, this immunological function is not limited to exceptional cases but a general feature of literature, which he denes thus: The immunological...