Freedom and Confinement in Modernity

Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment, which traditionally have been conceptualized as an existential anguish in the face of the nothingness of human life in the fallen world of technocratic modernity. Presupposed in these interpretations is a notion of (an unattainable) freedom as the opposite of confinement. By tracing the figure of the cage on several philosophic, aesthetic, and socio-political levels, and through rich interdisciplinary methodologies, the present essays treat Kafka's cages as the very critique of a culture that first posits a clear-cut opposition between confinement and freedom, and then sets up the latter as unattainable. Such a re-conceptualization of freedom, the central concept of liberal democracy, has never been attempted before in Kafka scholarship; the proposed volume has, therefore, deep ramifications for a variety of different disciplines, from philosophy and epistemology, to literary and political theory. Given the centrality of Kafka's work in fields ranging from German, English, and Comparative Literature, to Jewish Studies, Theatre Studies, and Critical Theory, it is also envisaged that the book will become a standard prescribed course-text on Kafka.