Why Franz Kafka may be ‘the last truly great writer’ of the post-modern era

His miniature literary legacy – two unfinished novels, a few dozen longer and short stories, letters, diaries and fragments – remains monumental to this date.

Mar 25, 2023 - 18:30
Why Franz Kafka may be ‘the last truly great writer’ of the post-modern era

During a recent drive to campus, I found myself getting into a deep conversation about literature, music and philosophy with my son, an undergraduate student in the early stages of an arts degree. While we were talking, Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone came on the radio. My son – who is reasonably well informed about culture – asked who was singing.

I was surprised that he didn’t know. After silently remonstrating myself as a musicologist and his father, I tried to explain Dylan’s place and import in the history of popular music. During the conversation, I happened to mention Franz Kafka.

“Who?” my son asked again.

This was, for me, a devastating, gaping hole to have discovered in my son’s knowledge. From my perspective as a musicologist and scholar of Central European culture, Kafka is one of the most important creative figures of the 20th century, and his work has resonated deeply through both serious and popular culture.

Kafka even makes cameo appearances in modern pop music: his short stories and letters inspired songs by British goth band The Cure, and pop icon David Bowie references him in his classic tune Ashes to Ashes, a song that expresses Bowie’s own remorseless self-analysis and paraphrases Kafka’s pithy quote about the power of literature to “break the...

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