![]() ![]() ![]() What follows this nightmarish transformation is quite logical, in its way-a fact which renders everything as unsettlingly terrible as it is ridiculous. The former is especially memorable for its opening sentence, which informs us that one morning a man named Gregor Samsa awoke to discover that he had been transformed into a gigantic cockroach. His story “The Metamorphosis” and his novel, The Trial, remain standard assignments in college literature courses. ![]() Indeed, Kafka’s nightmarish stories and novels occupy so unique a place in our sensibility that the word “Kafkaesque” is used and understood by people everywhere, even if they have never actually read anything he wrote.īut the truth is that many people have read his work. These pleasantly colorful and expressive images of Chagall’s Jewish mysticism naturally bring to mind the darker, less colorful (if deeper, in the way of textual dimensions) images evoked by Franz Kafka, a writer who helped define the modernist obsession with deconstruction and angst. But that’s not the extent of Chagall’s dream inventory, for it includes such bizarre objects as the head of a goat, the top part of a cello, elusively designed angels, and the head of a man wearing the billed cap of a 1920s streetcar conductor as he reads from a book. This print is the familiar one which shows a bride and groom drifting eerily off the ground, with one side of them cast in relief against a vast white chicken, the size of a bed with clean sheets. His story “The Branch Office in Prague” (Dirty Tricks, Johns Hopkins) is based on Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.”ĭuring telephone conversations my abstracted vision sometimes idles over a very small, signed Marc Chagall print on our wall. Jack Matthews’ new play, An Interview With the Sphinx, published by The Dramatic Publishing Company, will also come out this spring in a special signed limited edition with The Logan Elm Press in Columbus, Ohio. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |