We've traced the Romantic spirit--its excess, its emphasis on the
individual, its attention to nature and the sublime--in Goethe's
Werther. Now, with Kafka, we move to Modernism, a sensibility created
from the shards of the world war and answering the optimism of the
previous generation.
Kafka's themes, according to the Penguin editor, are "human loss,
estrangement, guilt, and anxiety" (xi), and his technique, new at the
time, is the subtle, complex, but most of all odd mixing of fact and
fantasy. Because of Kafka's style, and because they were
contemporaries, Kafka and Freud are often mentioned in the same
breath: "Neurosis may be the occasion, but literature is the
consequence" (xi).
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