Kafka's Creatures: Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings

Kafka's Creatures Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings is an interdisciplinary collection of essays on Franz Kafka's use of non-human creatures in his writings. It is written from a variety of interpretive perspectives and highlights diverse ways of understanding how Kafka's use of these creatures illuminate his work in general.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1 Introduction Marc Lucht 3
2 Kafka's Hybrids: Thinking Animals and Mirrored Humans Margot Norris 17
3 "Czechs, Jews and Dogs Not Allowed": Identity, Boundary, and Moral Stance in Kafka's "A Crossbreed" and "Jackals and Arabs" Hadea Nell Kriesberg 33
4 De-allegorizing Kafka's Ape: Two Animalistic Contexts Naama Harel 53
5 Agents of the Forgotten: Animals as the Vehicles of Shame in Kafka Tahia Thaddeus Reynaga 67
6 The Difficult Task of Being Real: Odradek, the Kittenlamb, and the Historical Individual Eleanor Helms 81
7 Consolation in Your Neighbor's Fur: On Kafka's Animal Parables Burkhard Müller 101
8 Crowds, Animality, and Aesthetic Language in Kafka's "Josephine" Thomas H. Ford 119
9 Performative Emotion in Kafka's "Josephine, the Singer; or, the Mouse Folk" and Freud's "The Creative Writer and Daydreaming" Andrea Baer 137
10 The Power of the Look: Franz Kafka's "The Cares of a Family Man" Esther K. Bauer 157
11 Four Hands Good, Two Hands Bad Tom Tyler 175
12 Who Identified the Animal? Hybridity and Body Politics in Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" and Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared) Melissa De Bruyker 191
13 The Portrait of an Armor-Plated Sign: Reimagining Samsa's Exoskeleton Dean Swinford 211
14 Extraterrestrial Kafka: Ahead to the Graphic Novel Henry Sussman 237
15 Index to Kafka's Use of Creatures in his Writings Donna Yarri 269
Index 285
About the Contributors 293