EWRT 1C Class 23

AGENDA Writing Workshop: Essay

# 2 You need two copies of

your essay for this exercise.

Discussion The Metamorphosis Historical Context Literary Style

Themes and Characters

Writers: On the back of the drafts you brought for your readers, answer these two questions: 1. Purpose: Here is what I hope to accomplish with my

readers:

2. Problem: Here is what I see as the single most important problem with this draft; please keep this in mind as you read through my paper:

Distributing your papersPass your papers to me. I will pass them to readers so that you get two responses to your essay. When you complete your first response, I will give you a second essay to read. This will ensure that each person gets at least one complete review. The goal is respond to the guideline prompts without asking any questions of the writer.

Directions Please read the writer’s answers to the two

questions we began with. Please follow the guidelines on the handout. Respond thoroughly, but keep in mind that

the goal is to respond to two essays if you can.

Return the essays to me your comments when you finish.

When you finish two essays, I will return your essays with comments. Read them and consider the advice.

Who can offer a summary of chapter one of The Metamorphosis?

Summary Chapter One

Gregor Samson goes to bed one night and wakes up, late for work, as a cockroach. We learn that Gregor is a traveling salesman. He hates his job but feels obligated to perform it because of his parents. They are indebted to his boss, and because of their advanced age it is left to Gregor to fulfill their debt. He spends day after day at this work, consumed yet unfulfilled. He has not missed a day of work in five years.

Franz Kafka is one of the founders of modern literature. His claim to greatness includes his service in completely collapsing the aesthetic distance that had traditionally separated the writer from the reader. In what is probably his most famous work of fiction, Die Verwandlung (1915; translated as "Metamorphosis," 1936-1938), the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, is presented to the reader as a man who has become an insect; Gregor's condition is never suggested to be an illusion or dream (although many critics have commented on its dreamlike qualities). In his shock at the result of Kafka's unmediated aesthetic distance, the reader is led to forgo his usual reflective and explicative function. Kafka has his characters perform that explicative function--hectically, repeatedly, self-contradictorily, and with a new kind of irony that has come to characterize modern literature. Finally, in an age that celebrates the mass, Kafka redirects the focus to the individual. His characters stand for themselves as individuals; in the case of the male protagonists--and almost all of his protagonists are male--they stand for Kafka himself.

Historical Context For most of Kafka's lifetime, his home town of Prague was a Czech

city within a German-speaking empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Only at the end of World War I did that Empire disappear, leading to the creation of an independent Czechoslovakia. But in 1912, when Kafka was writing The Metamorphosis, the Czechs had not yet won their independence, and despite its Czech majority, Prague was dominated by a German-speaking elite. Recognizing where the power lay in the city, the Jews of Prague tended to identify with the German minority rather than with the Czech majority; the Czechs therefore considered the Jews to be part of the German community, but the Germans themselves did not. As a result, it was easy for the Jews to feel that they did not fit in anywhere.

In general, Prague was a city of ethnic tensions, primarily between Czechs and Germans and between Czechs and Jews. In 1897, when Kafka was fourteen, the tensions erupted into anti-Semitic riots started by the Czechs. Thus Kafka would have grown up knowing hatred and hostility as well as the difficulty of fitting in.

Literary Style

Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?Third Person/Limited Omniscient

The story is mainly told through the perspective of Gregor Samsa, as if the narrator were planted with Gregor's human consciousness inside Gregor's insect body. We discover aspects of Gregor's body as he himself discovers them. If he itches, we don't know why until he looks to see what's making him itch. If he's hungry, we don't know what he likes to eat until he discovers his preference for rotten foods.

Technique This novella is an extended literalization of the

implications of the metaphor used in its initial sentence. Gregor is metamorphosed into an insectlike species of vermin, with Kafka careful not to identify the precise nature of Gregor’s bughood. German usage applies Kafka’s term, Ungeziefer, to contemptible, spineless, parasitic persons, akin to English connotations of the work “cockroach.” Gregor’s passivity and abjectness before authority link him with these meanings, as Kafka develops the fable by transforming the metaphor back into the imaginative reality of his fiction. After all, Gregor’s metamorphosis constitutes a revelation of the truth regarding his low self-esteem. It is a self-judgment by his repressed and continually defeated humanity.

Themes and Characters Alienation Father-Son

Antagonism Escapism Isolation Self-sacrifice Betrayal

Gregor Samsa Grete Samsa Mr. Samsa Anna Samsa The Chief Clerk Three Lodgers Charwoman

HOMEWORK? Again? @#% !

Finish The Metamorphosis