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Kafka's Rhetorical Moment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Clayton Koelb
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Abstract

Much of Kafka's fiction exploits language whose performative status is ambiguous–language that Paul de Man calls “rhetorical”–to generate a peculiar and characteristic narrative “space” in which Kafka's stories operate. Speech-act theory helps to clarify the way in which problems arising from language become the central problems that Kafka's characters face. In particular, the distinction between illocutions and perlocutions provides an analytic tool that reveals Kafka's abiding concern with the “gap,” or “aporia,” produced by assertions, requests, commands, and other illocutionary acts that turn out not to assert, request, or command anything the reader or listener can pin down. This tool helps us discover the linguistic sources for the bewilderment and anxiety that characterize Kafka's fictional world.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 98 , Issue 1 , January 1983 , pp. 37 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1983

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References

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