Betrachtung. Le immagini-pensiero di Franz Kafka

This article examines Kafka’s early short prose, with particular attention to the thought-figures gathered in Contemplation (1912). Moving from the aesthetically subversive paradigm of the flânerie, Kafka develops in his first published book a writing style which reflects the impasses of modern metropolitan life. By conducting a close reading of some short texts and by looking at the literary context to which they are genetically related, the paper seeks to bring out features of Kafka’s prose that belong to that particular form of German Modernist short prose called by Adorno “Denkbild”, such as paradoxicality, imponderability, reversibility of the opposites and representation of alienation. In addition to these functions, and with reference to more recent theories on representation of nonfunctionality (Francesco Orlando), gesture (Isolde Schiffermüller) and remediation through literature (Andreas Huyssen), this paper seeks to determine some core functions of the “thought-image” in Kafka’s early short prose and to highlight its importance in the history of this genre