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Was Kafka a political resister? His early biographer, Klaus Wagenbach, called him a socialist. Theodor Adorno saw defiance in Kafka's “autonome” art (135). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari cited Kafka's stubborn bachelordom as a politics of flight. Steven Soderbergh imagined an anarchic, violent freedom fighter in Kafka. But might the poet from Prague be offering us another, universally relevant form of resistance? One closer to all of us, hiding in plain sight? Yes, I say: the politics of radical love. It simmers throughout Kafka's texts and explodes powerfully in his last attempt at a novel, his magnum opus, Das Schloß.

The protagonist, K., meets Frieda, who has a striking look (Blick) in her eye (Schloß 60). This look reveals her readiness for a great struggle. Despite knowing her for less than an hour, K. tells her that they will struggle together. They will become an unusual couple refusing to conform to the expectations of the world. Only by joining forces can they gain the necessary strength: “Die Widerstände der Welt sind groß, sie werden größer mit den größeren Zielen und es ist keine Schande sich die Hilfe selbst eines kleinen einflußlosen aber ebenso kämpfenden Mannes zu sichern” (63–64).

The parallels are unmistakable between “Frieda” and “Felice”: Felice Bauer, to whom Kafka was twice engaged. With Felice, he had the only satisfying sexual experience in his life, while they were staying in adjoining hotel rooms. He was overcome by her Blick: “Jetzt aber sah ich den Blick des Vertrauens einer Frau und konnte mich nicht verschließen,” and “schön der Blick ihrer besänftigten Augen, das Sichöffnen frauenhafter Tiefe” (Briefe 1914–17 173; Tagebücher 795). Just as K. will take the castle by storm with Frieda, Kafka now plans to establish an intimate, radical household with Felice. He will leave Prague for her hometown of Berlin, where they will sleep in separate rooms with an adjoining door, just as in that magical hotel (Briefe 1914–17 173).

Neither Kafka's nor K.’s relationship works out, but that subtracts nothing from their potential. The psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg argued that some couples develop a “private morality” that allows them to resist convention (175). Although coupling itself is conventional, amorous pairs are the unit most capable of defying established beliefs, Kernberg insists. Couples are stronger than individuals yet small enough to avoid groupthink. Their independence threatens unstructured groups like political parties or, in Kafka's novel, the village cliques. In a line that Kafka struck through in his draft, K. tells Frieda that her stunning gaze (Blick) belongs to her but also to something larger than her: “Es ist ein Blick, der gewissermassen noch gar nicht Ihnen gehört und doch ihnen mehr” (Schloß: Apparatband 182). A couple of pages later, K. and Frieda conjoin in lovemaking that feels like a shared ethics: they experien

This article reconstructs a theoretical and methodological problem in the work of German literary scholar Emil Staiger, a representative of the postwar school of Werkimmanenz, which called for a renewal of form-sensitive practices of reading. It analyzes Staiger's notion of style and traces its application in his monumental Goethe monograph and his essay collection Stilwandel, highlighting the difficulties that arise from Staiger's attempt to operationalize style in the sense of an artwork's inner unity (“Einstimmigkeit”) for his study of dynamic and changing forms. These difficulties led him to reframe his notion of style in a 1968 paper that, however, ultimately left the problem of how to write a history of literary styles unresolved.

Our singer is called Franz. “Wer [ihn] nicht gehört hat, kennt nicht die Macht des Gesanges” (Kafka 193). These (slightly altered) opening lines of “Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse” came to mind when an audience member came up to me after a presentation I gave recently on “Kafka in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” She lamented the fact that not one of her students in the past three years had a notion of who Franz Kafka was. I was not surprised. For years, so many of us have relied on high school literature classes to introduce at least one of Kafka's stories to our students—usually it had been The Metamorphosis—that served as a base we could build on to take them to higher levels of understanding and appreciation of this world literary phenomenon. The new normal means that without a “canon” or “cultural literacy” as we knew it in the twentieth century (and I fully realize how loaded those two terms are today), Franz, the singer, like his beloved mouse Josephine, “wird [wohl]…bald…in gesteigerter Erlösung vergessen sein wie alle [seine] Brüder” (209). In Kafka's story “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie,” Rotpeter, the chimpanzee, explains that he managed to attain “die Durchschnittsbildung eines Europäers” (174). Our task to keep Kafka's works alive and part of “the cultural level of an average” college student (European or otherwise) has now become a bit more difficult. Like the protagonist of “Der Bau,” however, I am prepared “mit der Stirn…tausend- und tausendmal tage- und nächtelang gegen die Erde [anzurennen]” (425) and keep delving into Kafka's texts, long and short, to (I hope) illuminate the power—and absolute joy—of his writing.

I find that Kafka's accessibility begins with the little texts, which are, perhaps, also his most humorous. I never cease to enjoy Kafka's own evident amusement in writing his little story “Poseidon,” perhaps my favorite of his smaller pieces. Since I am working on a special issue on Kafka in the Age of Artificial Intelligence for the online journal Humanities that should be out later this year, I have come to think of “Poseidon” in this strange new context.

Kafka wrote this gem in 1920, but it was published only posthumously in 1936 in an edition by Max Brod. Poseidon, in Kafka's tale, is not the glorious god we think of from mythology. Instead of being the divine master over all the waters of the earth, Kafka's Poseidon is reduced to the role of bureaucratic administrator. Like a department chair, he spends his time at a desk running and rerunning calculations. Driven by a blind work ethic and an exaggerated sense of responsibility, this Poseidon devotes himself completely to his job. We are told he has tried to find another line of work—one might imagine him today going online to Monster.com—but all his attempts to find other work are doomed to failure, since as god of the oceans he is destined to assume the managerial post over the waters of the world.<