Literature as Pure Mediality: Kafka and the Scene of Writing

iii The utilization of an instrumental model that sees language itself as a means which is capable of bringing us towards what might be called fixed “meaning, ” is one of the greatest limitations in the human attempt to establish an authentic understanding of the dynamics of communication. An acceptance of language from this perspective constricts our ability to have an adequate confrontation, or more accurately, experience of/with an aesthetic work. This text explores the impact of conceiving the literature of Franz Kafka in light of what will be referred to as “Pure Mediality ” via an a-teleological approach that calls upon the thinking of Nietzsche, Deleuze, Guattari, Barthes, Adorno, and Derrida- among others. My reading of Kafka presents him as profoundly skeptical of instrumental language, very much influenced by the Vienna School language critics of the turn of the century. Kafka recognizes the inherent violence in any conceptual understanding of language, and therefore conceives of literature, or more precisely, literary or poetic language, as capabl