'A cage went in search of a bird': Reading repetitions in the writings of Kafka and Kierkegaard (Franz Kafka, Austria, Soren Kierkegaard)

Reading repetitions in the writings of Soren Kierkegaard and Franz Kafka entails tracing the rhetorical patterns that organize their texts. Such rhetorical micro-reading clarifies the presuppositions of hermeneutic and thematic interpretations of these texts. As such, my reading aligns itself with Paul de Man's larger project of pursuing readings that discern the rhetorical patterns that organize the distribution and the movement of the key terms; in this vein, de Man contends that questions of valorization can be considered only after the rhetorical status of a text has been clarified. Rhetorical reading involves suspending the belief that literary language refers to anything but itself. This approach ultimately arrives at an examination of the "origin" of readability and its relation to texts, an examination that poses a threat to hermeneutic and thematic modes of interpretation, and therefore also a threat to the aspects in Kafka and Kierkegaard's texts that support such interpretation. My reading of repetitions investigates the extent to which Kierkegaard and Kafka's texts agree with and invite rhetorical reading.; Such reading requires examining the following elements: the texts' reliance on and undermining of metaphorical logic, an undermining taking place by the texts operating according to a logic of adjacency rather than transcendence and of materiality rather than figural meaning; how the texts base themselves on the divergences between what the text means and how it means; the texts' disturbance of their own readability and how they in inverted fashion question the origin of readability; how the texts discuss and employ irony only to have it overtake their texts; how the structure of revocation instantiates the passage from "regular" irony to the irony of irony; how this passage displays the shift from considering unreadability as a product of the text disrupting the way in which the text works to considering unreadability as the monstrous condition of readability; and finally the texts' glimpsing of the monstrosity of language, primarily in language functioning as a machine. I have named the examination of these questions reading repetition.