Forhalingens retorik

Resumé

Carsten Madsen: “The Rhetoric of Deferral. The Experience of the Distant in Franz Kafka’s Prose”

Based on readings of several of Franz Kafka’s short stories, this article develops the thesis that every attempt at human action in his prose is reduced to sheer motion by a “rhetoric of deferral”, thus defusing the motive that was supposed to structure and orient the narrative. Further, the article discusses how the reader constituted by Kafka’s prose is subjected to a literary experience dominated by the distant, in such a way that even the near belongs to the distant. Finally, in reference to Kenneth Burke’s understanding of action, motion and identification, and to Maurice
Blanchot’s understanding of “the game of distant and near”, the article contends that the literary experience of reading Kafka belongs to a peculiar realm of experience. Reading Kafka is explained as an experience of the possible that, although nonsymbolic of the real, is nonetheless closely connected to the general conditions of experience.