Three sons. Franz Kafka and the fiction of J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and W. G. Sebald (Austria, South Africa, Germany)

In 1941 W.H. Auden asserted in The New Republic that, "had one to name the artist who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age that Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of." More than half a century later, Auden's evaluation has been irrefutably confirmed---not only by the relentless accumulation of scholarly commentary, but by the indelible impression the author's fiction has left in the novels of today's most highly regarded writers. J.M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and W.G. Sebald have grappled repeatedly with Kafka's influence in their critical essays as well as in their fiction. This dissertation examines the manifestations of that influence, particularly in Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003), Roth's Zuckerman Bound (1979-1985), and Sebald's Schwindel. Gefuhle (1990), illustrating the role of "misreading" in each writer's shaping (and reshaping) of his fictional voice. I argue that the most severe instances of misprision illuminate critical concerns in the author's oeuvre. Work on literary influence and intertextuality provides my basis for understanding the challenges posed by Kafka's precedence. I apply historical sociology in a chapter section devoted to Kafka's Judaism and fin de siecle Prague. Psychoanalytic approaches to literary interpretation have been incorporated for passages in Roth and Sebald where guilt and repression are understood by the authors in explicitly Freudian terms. And finally, I give ample consideration to the reading histories of all three beyond Kafka---the impact of Robert Walser, for instance, on Sebald; of James and Isaac Babel on Roth; of Woolf, Defoe, and the postwar Polish poets on Coetzee---, thus locating the obsessive relation to literature so conspicuous in Kafka's autobiographical writings at the center of my methodological approach.