Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

Region - Interculturality - Kafka. The project of interculturality revisited

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2019

Abstract

On the basis of a joint programmatic contribution, which no longer wants to see interculturality static, but rather as a process and 'draft', the essay asks about the conditions of the possibility of a history of literature that is applicable to the peculiarity of an unique intercultural (and thus multilingual) region. In doing so, he first pleads for consideration of the entire diversity of the relationship between the ethnic groups involved.

Furthermore, the impossibility of an adequate representation of the unmanageable diversity of literary historical developments is emphasized, but this does not mean that such representations are rejected, but rather the chances of an intercultural literary history are seen precisely in the fact that it cannot follow a uniform modeling (and so must always 'exhibit' its own impossibility). In the light of this assessment, the article asks in a second step whether and to what extent it is possible to use the literature itself as a reference for such an approach.

The frame of reference for this is provided by Kafka's work, especially his narrative on the The Great Wall of China, in that the process of 'analogous displacement', which is constitutive for the text, is reflected as a way of not only documenting the constructional character of literary historiography, but also to apply this process to them as a design principle.