Walser och Kafka: ett slags släktskap – Om familjelikheter mellan två författarskap

Instead of an intertextual approach, this bachelor thesis make use of Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance to examine the conceived relation between Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten and Franz Kafka’s The metamorphosis. The concept is also constituted of pointing out how the texts coincidently are not bound to each other. The purpose is to immerse the refinement of the literary communion between the two authors. The concept focus contact areas and individual areas of the texts, and these family resemblances are constituted by language games, which is to use the language for a specific function. The family resemblance examined in this thesis is "overreactions". The result shows that overreactions serve different functions at the two authors. Walser uses the language game with the function of demonstrating how man is contingent, while Kafka uses a similar language game but with the function of demonstrating how man has a an unreducible core which can be alienated. Even though the function is individual, a contact area of making a statement of man’s being is made by the use of resembling language games, and this sharpens a family resemblance