A Contribution to the Understanding of the Adjective Kafkaesque

Abstract

This paper provides in a comparative and synchronic key an overview of literary, historical and theoretical interpretations and understandings of the adjective kafkaesque, after the writer Franz Kafka. Though this adjective has substiantially distanced itself from Kafka's literary work during the second half od the 20th century and become a common place in everyday speech, used most frequently when encountering the perplexing and absurd bureucratic system (The Trial), it represents a complex structure in a literary text. „Kafkaesque“ can be understood as a type of code, an array of stylistic and thematic elements that function in texts or even infect other texts, not just in the field of literature but in other artistic media as well (Adams, 2002). The main quest of this paper is to thouroughly present the most dominant and far-reaching attempts of articulation of this adjective, as well as to pinpoint which stylistic and thematic units it refers to in a literary text. We suggest a five-segment typology of the most frequent kafkaesque elements. The „kafkaesque“ is most conveniently observed within several characteristic theme-motif paradygms, by which we imply themes, motifs, phenomena and methods that are most recognizable and imanent to Kafka's work (kafkaesque humour, paradox and atmosphere), or that in it emerge multiple times in a manner of repetition (animals and non-human creatures, bureacracy, institutions, the law). Kafka's specific literary style, language and short forms (parables, fables, aphorisms) will also be considered as typically kafkaesque.