Precarious Syntax: Kafka’s Sentence Writing
“My strength is no longer enough for a single sentence. If it were merely a matter of words, if it were enough to add a word and one could then turn away…” — Kafka had a distinct predilection for specific syntactic forms and conjunctions in his writing. Like most of his short prose pieces, “The Burrow” is an “if-then” story, whereas “The Penal Colony” is an “and also” text and temporal clauses dominate “The Metamorphosis,” The Trial, and America. Given the lectures he attended at the University of Prague and the contemporary discussions in the Brentano circle, it is no coincidence that the plots of these works hinge on the (mis)understanding of such syntactic structures. This lecture will argue that Kafka’s texts are not only symptomatic of the epistemology of syntax around 1900 but also exemplify a unique mode of sentence writing.
Oliver Simons is Professor of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. He is the author of Raumgeschichten. Topographien der Moderne in Philosophie, Wissenschaft und Literatur (2007), Literaturtheorien zur Einführung (2009; 2013), and Literary Conclusions: The Poetics of Ending in Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist (2022). He has co-edited volumes on German colonialism (2002), Franz Kafka (2007), Ingeborg Bachmann (2008), and The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (2017). He is also the editor of The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory.