
Die Transparenz der Folter
Franz Kafkas "In der Strafkolonie" aus Sicht der Postkolonialismus-Forschung
Wolfgang Streit(Author)
BoD - Books on Demand (Publisher)
1st Edition
Published on 10. December 2014
Book
Paperback/Softback
52 pages
978-3-7347-3595-0 (ISBN)
Description
Franz Kafka was strongly affected by questions of and writings about colonialism. Against this background this paper in the Ger-man language analyzes the way in which, as an author, he negoti-ates colonial matters in his novella In the Penal Colony. This text reverses the typical visual interaction in the contact zone of the colony, between the colonial context and the visitor to the colony. Also, the text sharpens the destabilizing impact of mimicry as the subaltern convict temporarily presents an inversion, or carnival of power, targeting not the colonial master, but the traveler responsi-ble for interpretation and, ultimately, the reader. This role is fur-ther underpinned by the motif of cannibalism. The subaltern is also a vehicle for the text to not only depict but also uncannily expose as constructed, the way in which the "other" is mobilized to provide the colonial apparatus with identity.
Most of all, however, on several levels the text epistemologically questions the fundamental fantasy of the colonial order of unequi-vocal meaning, as the "contrapuntal reading" of In the Penal Co-lony - according to Edward Said - reveals. Kafka's text depicts the futile dream of a unitary power system, primarily by means of the angst-ridden officer seeking to provide a spectacle of pretended transparency around the con¬struction plans for the machine, the death sentence, the machine's mechanics and the execution, with¬out allowing for any interpreta¬tion. All these textual strategies converge in the goal of exposing the untenable nature of the doomed colonial order depicted, even though Kafka as a person was far from criticizing Habsburg's colonial empire.
More details
Language
German
Place of publication
Norderstedt
Germany
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 190 mm
Width: 120 mm
Thickness: 4 mm
Weight
66 gr
ISBN-13
978-3-7347-3595-0 (9783734735950)
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Wolfgang Streit
Die Transparenz der Folter
Franz Kafkas "In der Strafkolonie" aus Sicht der Postkolonialismus-Forschung
E-Book
12/2014
1st Edition
BoD - Books on Demand
€3.99
Available for download
Person
Author
Wolfgang Streit unterrichtet in München.
Streit publiziert u.a. zu Michel Foucault, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Seamus Heaney, Franz Kafka, Francis Ford Coppola und Francis Bacon.
Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte sind:
Irland-Forschung; Postkolonialismus-Forschung; Neostruktu¬ralismus.
Zuletzt erschienen von ihm:
Einführung in die Postkolonialismus-Forschung. Theorien, Methoden und Praxis in den Geisteswissenschaften. Nor¬derstedt: BoD (2014).
Joyce/Foucault. Sexual Confessions. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press (2005).