Kafka’s Der Verschollene and the issue of labour
Abstract
The issue of labour relations plays a central and often underestimated role in Kafka’s fiction. In this paper, possible reasons for this lack of critical attention are considered, especially in Marxist-oriented criticism: thereafter, the main occurrences of this theme are analysed, firstly in Kafka’s texts in general, and then in the novel that mainly deals with it, The Man Who Disappeared, written in 1912-1913. A distinction is also attempted between “ordinary work” and “extraordinary work” within Kafka’s idea of work.
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