While his memory languished under Nazi censorship, Franz Kafka covertly circulated through occupied France and soon emerged as a cultural icon, read by the most influential intellectuals of the time as a prophet of the rampant bureaucracy, totalitarian oppression, and absurdity that branded the twentieth century. In tracing the history of Kafka's reception in postwar France, John T. Hamilton explores how the work of a German-Jewish writer from Prague became a modern classic capable of addressing universal themes of the human condition.
Hamilton also considers how Kafka's unique literary corpus came to stimulate reflection in diverse movements, critical approaches, and philosophical schools, from surrealism and existentialism through psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and structuralism to Marxism, deconstruction, and feminism. The story of Kafka's afterlife in Paris thus furnishes a key chapter in the unfolding of French theory, which continues to guide how we read literature and understand its relationship to the world.

John T. Hamilton is William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, USA. He is the author of seven books, including most recently Philology of the Flesh (2018) and Complacency: Classics and its Displacement in Higher Education. (2022).

Abbreviations
I. Gradus ad Parnassum
The Writer and the Author in Theory · Through a Glass, darkly · From the Louvre to the Louvre · An Improbable Apparition · A Second Life
II. Metamorphoses
Naturalization Papers · Amid Intimacy and Exoticism · Universal Man · Dreams, Rivers, Snow · Translative Decisions · Bifurcations
III. Trials
Paratexts · The Adventurer · The Saint · A Certain Plume · Extremism · Non liquet
IV. Contingencies
Preoccupations · Nothing but Nothing · Seasickness on Land · Phantom War · Homo absurdus · Impossible Hope · Objective Style
V. Judgments
Upside Down, Right Side Up · Disengagement · Incendiaries · The Child · The Author in Theater
VI. Labyrinths
Signs of Change · The New New · Rhizomes · Primal Scenes · Derrida's Pharmacy
Bibliography
Index