| "Guilt is always beyond doubt," exclaims the Officer in Franz Kafka's story "In the Penal Colony." This "basic principle," as the Officer calls it, is not only characteristic in its apodictic and enigmatic style for Kafka's writing, it is a manifestation of theological, philosophical, and legal discourse within literature. This dissertation is situated at this intersection of literature, theology, philosophy, and law. It investigates the conceptualization of punishment and its poetological (concerning the art (or craft) of writing (poesis )) manifestations in literary texts. On the basis of early twentieth century texts, it shows that various discourses involving the notion of punishment provide an essential contribution to an interdisciplinary, interdiscursive interpretation of the set of literary texts chosen. This study focuses on works of four German-Jewish writers and examines their complex relation to Jewish religious texts concerning the notion of punishment. These selected narratives, which center on penal action and therefore engage with theories of punishment are: Franz Kafka, "The Judgment" (1913), "In the Penal Colony" (1919); Alfred Döblin, Babylonian Wandering (1934); Gertrud Kolmar, The Jewish Mother (∼1931); and Joseph Roth, Job: The Story of a Simple Man (1930). This study explores how punishment serves as important intertextual reference and argues that this multi-faceted concept, which is based on a heteronomous framework (i.e., the law as external) becomes a poetic strategy and asserts textual autonomy. In other words, the literary text displays a modification and appropriation of an external law in establishing its own law, its autonomy, by giving the law (nomos) unto itself (autos). It examines this poetological use and investigates the reflection of this autonomy in the novels. In proposing that these texts are, to a degree, intertextually related to biblical and rabbinical literature, such as the Talmud, the mode of such engagement is explored, which rarely appears affirmative and more often theatrical, comic, ironic, or cynical. This investigation shows that the various textual characters express a deep sense of justice—justice which is not always provided by legal authorities within the text, but rather "poetic justice.". |
