Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Upon this premise, Appel cantilevers the argument that "Yes" versus "No" is the primary aesthetic division of the 20th century. He outlines a hypothetical, prescriptive bookshelf spanning the range of 20th century art. The "No" shelf includes Kafka, T.S. Eliot, George Grosz and the pantheon of Pop art, which emphasize chaos and mass hysteria in the modern age and the mob of mankind. This is the "No" that is countered by the affirmative "Yes" of Matisse, Lachaise, Brancusi and Delaunay, Joyce, Nabokov and Chagall, along with "Yes" shelfmates W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Richard Wilbur...
Peeping out everywhere is Franz Kafka's haunted, haunting face. Kafka is a poster and T-shirt industry. Shining out from the Central European confectionery window frames and snowflake Bohemian crystal: the consumptive's black, intelligent eyes. He is Prague's presiding household god, part of the city's neurotic Shinto...
...Kafka who invented the castle as literature -- the Prague castle of his novel being the symbolic seat of mysterious, anonymous power, an effect the Communists had a genius for. That Havel came to preside over the castle seemed the Czechoslovaks' graceful, transcendent leap out of the dark, a sort of miracle -- and an impish historical touch...
...KAFKA. In his first film since sex, lies, and videotape, Steven Soderbergh serves up a flimsy whodunit starring Kafka (played by Jeremy Irons, the male Meryl). It's a film-school movie, with devices lifted from The Third Man: vertiginous staircases, malevolence glistening off the cobblestones, a madman's drool caught in the Prague moonlight. As someone murmurs, "All a bit much, don't you think?" Yes, pity -- and not nearly enough...
...Kafka...