Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature
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"How can we enter into Kafka's work? This work is a rhizome, a burrow. The castle has multiple entrances whose rules of usage and whose locations aren't very well known."[1], tr. Dana Polan |
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Kafka: Pour une Littérature Mineure is a work of literary theory by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari first published in French by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1975.
It was translated into English as Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature by Dana Polan in 1986 and published by the Minnesota University Press.
From the publisher:
- "In this classic of critical thought, Deleuze and Guattari challenge conventional interpretations of Kafka's work. Instead of exploring preexisting categories or literary genres, they propose a concept of "minor literature"—the use of a major language that subverts it from within. Writing as a Jew in Prague, they contend, Kafka made German "take flight on a line of escape" and joyfully became a stranger within it. His work therefore serves as a model for understanding all critical language that must operate within the confines of the dominant language and culture.
- For Deleuze and Guattari, literature—especially minor literature—cannot be a refuge. They see such writing as essentially political in nature, intimately concerned with the relation between language and power. Their analysis ultimately leads to a view of Kafka's work as a new mode of writing-a machine of expression-that allows us to account for the "machines" that condition our actual relation to the world, to the body, to desire, and to the economy of life and death."
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