Modernist Forms of Freedom and Captivity in Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger and Franz Kafka’s The Castle
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Martina Jauch
Abstract
Illustrative of Mark Twain’s well-known ability to generate new modes of writing, The Mysterious Strangers is another testament to his acute awareness of the modernist struggles that transgressed national boundaries. Both the later Mark Twain and German author Franz Kafka became known for their relentless assaults on perversions of cultural idealism in their literary careers and the comparative analysis of their fiction shows that they share an understanding of literature as a medium uniquely suited to telling the realist meta-narrative of a breakdown of social norms and restrictions via the figure of an anti-hero.
Outlining the self’s imprisonment in the logic of history, Twain copes with the nihilistic mood by writing this dream vision, in which society is not merely an ideological construct but a fleeting vision of despair concluding in the ultimate displacement of human beings in a depressing state of annihilation. This essay examines Twain’s and Kafka’s novellas The Castle (1926) and The Mysterious Stranger (1910) to demonstrate that not only is Twain’s complex novel falsely neglected in literary criticism but also that his fiction is one of the first to transcend realist endeavors by adopting an ontological aesthetic and portraying the collapse of the distance between subject and object.
The Twainian landscape is populated by a protagonist whose narrative presence fractures any possible unity in the novel, even though his life is clearly structured as well as mastered by captivity through castles, contracts, and vagabond figures. This examination attempts to shed light onto Mark Twain as the hitherto neglected predecessor of writers portraying an artful senselessness of being and the illimitable as well as forms of confinement as a defining factor in the pre-established disharmony of society and opposed to forms of freedom in the novels.
Abstract
Illustrative of Mark Twain’s well-known ability to generate new modes of writing, The Mysterious Strangers is another testament to his acute awareness of the modernist struggles that transgressed national boundaries. Both the later Mark Twain and German author Franz Kafka became known for their relentless assaults on perversions of cultural idealism in their literary careers and the comparative analysis of their fiction shows that they share an understanding of literature as a medium uniquely suited to telling the realist meta-narrative of a breakdown of social norms and restrictions via the figure of an anti-hero.
Outlining the self’s imprisonment in the logic of history, Twain copes with the nihilistic mood by writing this dream vision, in which society is not merely an ideological construct but a fleeting vision of despair concluding in the ultimate displacement of human beings in a depressing state of annihilation. This essay examines Twain’s and Kafka’s novellas The Castle (1926) and The Mysterious Stranger (1910) to demonstrate that not only is Twain’s complex novel falsely neglected in literary criticism but also that his fiction is one of the first to transcend realist endeavors by adopting an ontological aesthetic and portraying the collapse of the distance between subject and object.
The Twainian landscape is populated by a protagonist whose narrative presence fractures any possible unity in the novel, even though his life is clearly structured as well as mastered by captivity through castles, contracts, and vagabond figures. This examination attempts to shed light onto Mark Twain as the hitherto neglected predecessor of writers portraying an artful senselessness of being and the illimitable as well as forms of confinement as a defining factor in the pre-established disharmony of society and opposed to forms of freedom in the novels.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Acknowledgments 5
- Table of Contents 7
- Confinement Studies in American Literature 1
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Part I: Confinement Narratives of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender
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Fiction
- “Clapt in that prison”: Confinement in Anne Bradstreet’s “Of the Four Ages of Man” 19
- Masculine Competition and Confinement in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables 35
- Modernist Forms of Freedom and Captivity in Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger and Franz Kafka’s The Castle 49
- Transgressing the Racial Confinement in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain 67
- Counternarratives of Confinement in Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience TM” 87
- When We Make It – Nuyorican Constriction and Dreams of Freedom 109
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Acknowledgments 5
- Table of Contents 7
- Confinement Studies in American Literature 1
-
Part I: Confinement Narratives of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender
-
Fiction
- “Clapt in that prison”: Confinement in Anne Bradstreet’s “Of the Four Ages of Man” 19
- Masculine Competition and Confinement in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables 35
- Modernist Forms of Freedom and Captivity in Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger and Franz Kafka’s The Castle 49
- Transgressing the Racial Confinement in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain 67
- Counternarratives of Confinement in Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience TM” 87
- When We Make It – Nuyorican Constriction and Dreams of Freedom 109
