Beasts and Odd Creatures in Kafka's Short Stories
Your Instructor
PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature
University of California, Los Angeles
Sophia Lencioni is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at UCLA. She completed her undergraduate studies in German and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. Areas of specialty include: border studies, literature of migration, posthumanism, multispecies studies, animal studies and translation studies. Her dissertation compares German language literature and Latin American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries with a focus on animal and plant imagery, metaphors, and characters.
What you'll learn
Thoroughly understand the animals in Kafka's literature
Gain familiarity with notable literary criticism surrounding Kafka's oeuvre
Learn to close read literary passages to notice rhetorical devices and understand their importance
Reflect on assumptions about boundaries between humans and non human creatures
Critically analyze literary passages
Course Schedule
For this week, we will read Kafka's short story "A Report to an Academy" wherein Red Peter gives a speech and explanation detailing his transformation from an ape into a man. This text will make us question categories of that which is civilized. We will also read Kafka's short story "Investigations of a Dog" and the first half of Naama Harel's Introduction to her book Kafka's Zoopoetics (2020). In this week's readings we see anthropomorphized animals, though Harel will warn against allegorization and we will begin to think about what it means to read the animals for themselves rather than as metaphors...
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Your Instructor
PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature
University of California, Los Angeles
Sophia Lencioni is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at UCLA. She completed her undergraduate studies in German and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. Areas of specialty include: border studies, literature of migration, posthumanism, multispecies studies, animal studies and translation studies. Her dissertation compares German language literature and Latin American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries with a focus on animal and plant imagery, metaphors, and characters.