Abstract

I argue in this dissertation for a theoretical model, arising from within Kafka's Diaries, which increasingly comes to dominate Kafka's preoccupations and styles between 1912 and 1917: an immanent theory of writing. Kafka's thinking on his own act of writing offers important insights into the modernist aesthetic. ;Chapter one sets up the basic context for our subsequent readings of Kafka's notebooks and parables. I have chosen "The Judgment" as a logical place to begin. Not only has "The Judgment" the unique status of being a work which was, for Kafka, his first significant work, but his reflections upon its construction in his Diaries supply invaluable insights into how Kafka "reads" his own work. Chapter one, then, postulates a "dynamic" process of writing which includes two separate phases: the 'experience' of writing, and the inevitable 'separation' from the work that results. ;Chapter two and three concern implications naturally drawn from this 'model' of writing. How, for example, does this twofold process reflect itself in his 'theologically' inflected Blue Octavo Notebooks? How does this model of writing help to understand his Letters? In chapter three, I examine how interpretive desire is both excited and thwarted by Kafka's "Schreibakt", using one parable, Eleven Sons, as the center object of discussion. ;Chapter four concerns Kafka's short story, "In The Penal Colony". Using both historical as well as theoretical discussions of this story, I attempt to describe the space of writing Kafka implies. This space is certainly one of extreme ambivalence for Kafka. It is not about "writing" as much as it is about "reading". And as the text's message becomes oddly "participatory"--literally a "communication" close to that of self-sacrifice, we encounter an extreme limit suggested by Kafka's notion of the text as the space of writing. ;In the last chapter, I use the theoretical model we found arising from within Kafka's own literary experience and apply this model to Joyce. Our reading of Finnegans Wake emphasizes a "participatory" notion of communication, one which violently reconfiguring the notion of writing and reading subjects. The act of reading is violently appropriated by the writing self