Essential Question: How can learning about an author’s background help the reader understand it impact on their writing?

Other ways to convey info: speech, skit, song, visual art (painting, scuplture, etc.), op-ed, game

Franz Kafka often wrote in accordance with four axioms: compared with the divine law, no matter how unjust it may sometimes appear to us, all human effort, even the highest, is in the wrong, whatever our minds or our feelings may tell us, the claim of the divine law to unconditional reverence and obedience is absolute, there is a right way to life, and its discovery depends on one’s attitude to powers which are almost unknown

1883- Kafka is born to a Jewish family in Prague. He and his father had a poor relationsjip (Father domineering, Kafka sensitive) and they lived in the ghetto

1901- Kafka goes to Karl Ferdinand University (in defiance of his father) to study law. He met Max Brod, who became a close friend and literary executor later in his life.

1907- Took a job at an insurance office, then worked for the government handling worker’s compensation claims. Began writing stories that drew from his own life at this time, and published short stories in literary magazines. His novels the Trial and the Castle were never completed.

1924- Kafka dies of tuberculosis. He asks Max Brod to finish the manuscripts but insted he publishes them post-humously

The Trial

Based on Kafka’s complicated relationship with his fiancee felice and her friend. He was engaged to Felice, but broke it off. He became involved with a friend of Felice named Grete. However, he still felt rejected by Felice and asked her to come back to him. She did, they got re-engaged, but he vowed that he still loved Grete. To settle this, he was confronted in his hotel room by Felice, Grete, Felice’s sister, and Kafka’s friend as a means of sorting the situation out.

Kafkaesque- something unescessarily complicated or confusing, irony of character’s circular reasoning, often office workers,