The Kafkaesque Manifesto
by Nathan Dixon
Writing aimed at definition must be clear and concise. With this maxim in mind, the definite article in the above title smells fishy. There are, of course, other Kafkaesque Manifestos, and surely, these manifestos likewise define themselves with definite articles. Such is the nature of manifestos. But already we have jumped ahead—to the third titular word before we have yet finished with the first, to say nothing of the second, which is, of course, the bread and butter of the title. Let us pause, then, before we begin, to take a breath. And in this breathless interval, “let us abandon” the definite, let us “suspend it for a while” as Derrida did “the law as prohibition,” in order that we—like him—might move forward (197). We are left, then, with “Kafkaesque Manifesto,” and the second problem becomes immediately apparent: the adjectival nature of the word “Kafkaesque.” At once, this may mean “a manifesto about the Kafkaesque,” or “a manifesto in the style of Franz Kafka.” This problem is easier to fix: I refer, of course, to the former. Then again,
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Reminiscence the First:
I rode my bike to Central Campus to make sure I was signed up for the thesis-writing dummy class that would round out my hourly obligations as a master’s student and set me up for graduation. Neither of my advisors were in their offices, so I went to the department chair who had been warring with my advisors since before my tenure about trivial matters in which I consciously chose not to involve myself. The department chair explained that the deadline had passed for registration and asked if I had consulted the handbook, not knowing
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
this opening might be seen as an experiment in the latter, which immediately throws an unsavory shadow upon the assertion of the previous sentence. And what do we make of the opening sentence? Surely, I have not followed my own dictum to be “clear and concise.” A boloney sandwich, then, from the get-go? You may call me Oscar Myer and hotdog to strangers about your spelling prowess, but there again we fall into the trap of order—first names, second names, to say nothing of pronunciation (and if you ask me why, I’ll say, “Academics have a way with B-O-L-O-G-N-A”). Regardless—and again—before moving to the prescriptive definitions that might open this, or any other, manifesto—before we get to the (name brand) meat of the issue, that is—there is the niggling urge to define the word definition. Christ Almighty! Is it no longer possible to get back to the place from which we started? Meaning begins to break down as we stumble along toward the source, which means I have once again—and already—tangled up the binary broken down above. We move toward (i.e., away from) the Kafkaesque in the manner of Franz Kafka. There is no other way. In embarking, we become somnambulists on treadmills in the gray world where pseudo-events crowd around us ad infinitum. This will make sense in time. Trust me. Forward march.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
(because my advisors had told me not to tell her) that one of my tasks as a graduate assistant was to revise and update this handbook to the specifications of my advisors. I knew for a fact there was nothing in the handbook about registration because I had effectively written (transcribed, edited, curated, etc.) the entire thing. Preceding each of my previous semesters at the school, I had been contacted about the course offerings by one of my advisors and advised on what to take (in order to graduate) by the other. I had never filled out a registration form, but had instead indicated to my advisor (the head of the graduate program)
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
There was an old chap called Michael Finnegan.
Kafkaesque, adj.
Of or relating to the writings of Franz Kafka; resembling the state of affairs or a state of mind described by Kafka.
Manifesto, n.
a. A public declaration or proclamation, written or spoken; esp. a printed declaration, explanation, or justification of policy issued by a head of state, government, or political party or candidate, or any other individual or body of individuals of public relevance, as a school or movement in the Arts.
b. In extended use: a book or other work by a private individual supporting a cause, propounding a theory or argument, or promoting a certain lifestyle.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
the courses I wanted to take, and by some magical flick of his fingers on the keyboard, I was automatically enrolled in the appropriate courses. The department head—the sworn enemy of my advisors—shook her head disapprovingly about my failure to read the handbook (which I had written) and told me I would need to see the dean. The dean’s office was under construction, and the interim office was on the other side of campus. This office too was under construction, and a cardboard sign—on which a map was drawn with a sharpie marker—sent me back the other way. When I finally arrived in a classroom like any other,
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
2. A proof, a piece of evidence. Obs.
He grew whiskers on his chin-i-gin.
We lump particular works of art beneath the heading Kafkaesque. Paintings, films, installation pieces, musical compositions, dance performances, short stories, novels, poems, plays, etc.—works with a beginning, a middle, and an end (emphasis on end)—though Kafka himself found it difficult to terminate his most ambitious undertakings. Episodes. Fragments. Twisted bits of string. Although the man was a writing machine—as expounded upon by Deluze and Guattari—what Kafka wrote of Gerstacker’s mother, might well be said of him: “she spoke with great difficulty, it was difficult to understand her, but what she said” (The Castle 316). And that, according to Harman’s translation, that’s where Kafka quit. Withholding what she said. The book famously ends mid-sentence, effectively dodging the curse of denouement. Did Kafka
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
the dean inside gave me a sheet of paper and informed me that I needed the signature of both of my advisors as well as the signature of my department head. I had to wait for my advisors to arrive on campus, and then wait for an hour and a half, because while I was talking to the first, the second began teaching a class. Then I headed back to the department head—the sworn enemy of my advisors—who shook her head, mumbled something about the handbook, and signed the sheet of paper. When I returned to the dean’s office she was away at lunch. I waited until she returned, collected her signature, and headed to the bursar’s
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
believe this was as good a point as any to terminate his most substantial novel, or had he simply lost himself in the same strange country as K? The last four words of the first German edition alternately read “the door was closed.” Exactly, one wants to respond. As a result, we must satisfy ourselves with the fragmentary form of the novel that remains. But even here we run into trouble. For Kafka did not—in fact—believe he had finished: “I have not spent this past week very cheerfully,” he writes to his friend Max Brod, “for I have had to give up the castle story, evidently for good” (qtd. in Pasley 318). Only in a Kafkaesque world could we equate “giving up” as synonymous with “completion.” Further, he notoriously asked Brod to destroy any remaining fragments upon his death, and thus wipe them from existence all together. Perhaps with his dissatisfaction, we should likewise be dissatisfied. Then again, the incomplete nature of the work feels natural. Form follows function. Kafka’s work scatters seeds that spawn not only the rhizome, but also proliferating Odradeks, those standing spools of “broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together” lurking by turns “in the
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
office. There was nothing they could do, they told me, until I first went to see the registrar. The registrar sent me to student accounting who sent me back to the department chair for a special note. When I returned, student accounting sent me to the bank. When I returned, student accounting sent me to the registrar, who—in turn—sent me back to student accounting. When I returned, student accounting sent me to the bursar’s office, which had, of course, closed for the day—five minutes before my arrival—though I could still see through the window of the locked door two women sitting and smoking cigarettes beneath the NO
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall,” etc., yet eluding analysis—“scrutiny is impossible”—because they are “extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of” (428). The field of his work proliferates in every direction, even as his landscapes shrink toward fragmentary spools of tenements glimpsed through clouds of smog. The miasma likewise embodies Kafka’s work, and the rhizome is not built from blades of grass, but from human leaves that waft and shudder in ubiquitous bureaucratic machines of alienation and reification. Perhaps this smog has become, as Whitman so eloquently put it, “the common air that bathes the globe” (360). Kafka, however, certainly saw through the smokescreen of hierarchical organization. At the beginning of the short story “The Cares of a Family Man,” he announces that “the uncertainty of both interpretations” of the word “Odradek” allows “one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word” (428). Logic—which Marshall McLuhan argues depends “on the presentation of connected and sequential facts” (45)—gives way to magic. Kafka gives the reader neither of the definitions to which he refers, yet he denies them both out of hand. When one embarks upon a quest to define (i.e. classify) “the Kafkaesque,” the
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
SMOKING sign. They blew their smoke into the gray haze that hung in the concrete window well. When I returned the next day, the pinballing continued, and I felt the old hysterical feeling welling up in my gut, the green vibrations beginning in the backs of my eyes. I became so sure as I jogged back and forth across campus that I was about to either cry or scream that I finally found it funny and began to laugh instead. It was then that I noticed on the ground by my feet three golden 9mm bullets. Begin Again.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
inevitable feeling, before ever leaving the harbor, is that whatever definition (i.e. destination) one reaches will be as unsatisfactory as the omitted meanings of the word “Odradek.” Readers must ask themselves if arrival is, in fact, possible. Derrida strikes at this problem when he asserts that what we call “‘literature’ has something to do with the drama of naming, the law of the name and the name of the law” (187). The drama of naming involves describing or defining something, and it becomes apparent that I should have included—as was my inclination from the beginning—a definition of the word “definition.” But we are past that now, following broken bits of thread into dictionaries full of blank pages. Derrida goes on to assert that “to be invested with its categorical authority, the law must be without history, genesis, or any possible derivation” (191); that it is necessary for “all literature to exceed literature,” which means that the truly literary work does not belong “to the field,” but acts as “the transformer of the field” (215); and that “literature can play the law,”—though it cannot be the law—"repeating it while diverting or circumventing it” (216). He thereby maneuvers around the definitions of both “law” and “literature,” a maneuver that is
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Reminiscence the Second:
In submitting an abstract to the annual conference of the American Literature Association (ALA), I lied to a panel moderator—whom I had quickly looked-up via my university library’s search engine—by telling her that I had come across, read, and enjoyed a particular article of hers, and that this article had helped me formulate my own argument in the paper I had already written and hoped to present at the conference. To be clear, I had neither read her article, nor written any paper for the conference. These were lies that I told, in hope
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
itself very Kafkaesque. Remember the old farmer’s son from Kafka’s “Homecoming,” who “dare[s] not knock at the kitchen door,” but, “only listen[s] standing at a distance, so as not to be surprised by an eavesdropper.” He will apparently hesitate forever, for “the longer one hesitates before the door, the more of a stranger one becomes.” As he watches the doorknob—which he will, of course, never reach—he becomes increasingly alien to that which he calls “home,” although, of course, the very meaning of “home” begins to fall apart the longer he crouches at a distance keeping “his secret.” Or remember the grandfather from “The Neighbouring Village” who “can hardly understand . . . how a young man can undertake to ride to the neighbouring village without wondering whether—even if everything goes right—the span of a normal happy life will be enough for such a ride” (208). Or remember K. who cannot reach the Castle, “though nothing else mattered to him,” K., who realizes “as he c[o]me[s] closer” that the Castle itself “was only a rather miserable little town, pieced together from village houses” (8). These instances bring to mind Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox—that in order to travel from one point to another, one must first travel
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
of flattering her into accepting my abstract. The moderator, swollen with the pride of remaining relevant, gladly accepted this abstract, and I subsequently submitted a request for “professional-development funding” to my department to fly to San Diego for the conference. Despite the fact that every literature professor in my department admits that conference attendance—a glib affair to be avoided at all costs—plays no part in eventual job attainment, and hence, does nothing to develop one professionally, they encourage it, and I looked forward to an all-expense-paid trip to sunny San Diego. A global pandemic, however, broke out during spring break, and the ALA
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
halfway there; before one can get halfway there, one must get a quarter of the way there; before a quarter, an eighth; before an eighth, a sixteenth, and so on, ad infinitum—which ultimately concludes that movement is an illusion. The trip itself can never begin. Jorge Louis Borges describes the characters of two of Kafka’s stories at the end of his article “Kafka and his Precursors”: “in the first, they never leave the city; in the second, they never reach it” (365). These two stories, seemingly exact opposites, are in fact, manifestations of the same theme of inertness. Roberto Calasso says as much when he identifies “election and condemnation [as] almost indistinguishable” (5), and says more when he claims that, although the “terms are reversed” in The Trial and The Castle, “the story is the same—and it keeps going” (9). The ending of The Castle is, in fact, a practice in the telos of unending. Although Kafka leaves out the ellipsis, the dot-dot-dot is, of course, implied, and it matters. The fragments build upon one another, but not in any linear way, rather as Benjamin might say, as “one single catastrophe, which keeps pilling wreckage upon wreckage” (259). The storm of the Kafkaesque catches in our collective wings, and like Benjamin’s Angel of
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
conference was cancelled. There was no longer any reason for me to write the paper that I had lied about having written, and I suddenly found myself with a surplus of time to organize the refuse that had accumulated about my desk. While transferring stapled-together computer printouts from the floor to the bookcase, I came across the moderator’s article that I had lied about having read. It was fully annotated in my own handwriting. Even the endnotes were underlined in blue Bic ballpoint, with exclamatory marginalia—about intentional fallacies and straw man arguments and the prevalence of false binaries. Not only had I inadvertently told
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
History we “can no longer close them.” So, we are driven “irresistibly into the future . . . as the pile of debris before [us] grows towards the sky” (260). Thus, Derrida’s tiptoeing around the periphery—his leaden movement always reminiscent of, and as exact as, the little pencil nub attached to the arcing arm of a compass—becomes the movement of one upon a treadmill unanchored. The wheels within the loop of the belt move in line with the belt, which means the contraption shifts opposite the direction in which the walker walks. Derrida’s maneuver imitates the movement of Kafka’s characters, and emerges as the only maneuver, with which to strike at the Kafkaesque. To get at the idea of the titular adjective—the bread and butter, the thing itself—we must beat around the bush, and as soon as we think we are walking toward it, we find we are farther away.
The wind came up and blew them in again.
We lump particular complete works of art beneath the heading Kafkaesque, but we also lump in “broken-off bits of thread” from other works of art (i.e. fragments excerpted from the whole), works that, if considered in their entirety, might not be considered Kafkaesque in the least. And as we jog along that pencil path that arcs around the meaning of “literature,”
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
the truth about having read the article, but I had cut my critical teeth upon it, developing in the process a professional persona that I could use to generate hypothetically-plausible abstracts and filch money from a dying department for vacations disguised as development.
Begin Again.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“the law,” and “the Kafkaesque,” we find that it is not only artwork, whether it be fully formed or fragmentary, that hangs about the tumbledown Castle of meaning, but also fragments of our everyday lives, as well as figments of our imaginations, all “knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors” (“The Cares of a Family Man” 428). The Kafkaesque engenders a green feeling in the gut. An artistic work can accomplish this, or a drowsy fantasy, or a dream, or a single instance standing out from the mundane everyday, or perhaps, the persistence of the mundane everyday, etc. And, surely, one need not be familiar with Kafka’s works to be familiar with this feeling. Borges names multiple precursors to Kafka and asserts that “Kafka’s idiosyncrasy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree.” “But if Kafka had not written,” he continues, “we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist” (365). We like to think of anything that falls under the umbrella of the Kafkaesque as derivative of Kafka’s originality, or at least a descendant of his peculiar vision. But Borges shows that Kafka’s “work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future” and that “each writer creates his precursors” just as he creates his
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Reminiscence the Third:
I do not feel like an imposter. I have sat-in on the classes of other composition instructors. I do not feel their classes are any better than my own. I attend the graduate seminars and workshops. I know that I have something to offer. I simply recognize that I do not have the time to do all that needs to be done. That is to say, I can only do what I can do—and even in writing these words, I experience the déjà vu of the tautology. But then again, as the monkey-man says in “A report to an Academy,” “if you have to learn, you learn” (234). The anxiety
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
successors (365). Simultaneously novel and glaringly obvious, Borges’s conception of the author as converser with both the past and the future—the fashioner of both disparate precursors and unknown descendants—recalls Benjamin’s idea of “transmissibility” (144). This idea can be found within “Some Reflections on Kafka,” a chapter Benjamin opens by declaring that “Kafka’s work is an ellipse with foci that are far apart and are determined, on the one hand, by mystical experience (in particular, the experience of tradition) and on the other, by the experience of the modern big-city dweller” (141). Let us think of these two foci as the wheels around which the belt of Kafka’s work turns and—voila—the treadmill appears again. Kafka’s angelic readers, step toward the foci that represents mystical experience (that of tradition), which propels them backwards toward modernity (and the big city dweller), a foci that stands precariously “at the mercy of a vast machinery of officialdom whose functioning is directed by authorities that remain nebulous” (141). But Benjamin’s contention that Kafka was privy to no “far-sightedness,” no “prophetic vision,” that he “listened hard to tradition, and he who listens hard does not see” must be countered with the simple fact that so
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
swells to a boiling point of free associations. In bed at night, my brain sizzles in my skull as roaches begin falling from the ceiling. Utterly overwhelmed, my head upon the pillow, I cannot fall asleep at night. I pop pink pills of Benadryl as the anxiety about the workload and the professional obligations turns to anxiety about the anxiety itself. I can hear the lisp of roaches fluttering in the dark before they plip upon the floor. I am woozy in the mornings and spend the days rolling around this sentence in my mouth: I have forgotten how to fall asleep. Again: I have forgotten how to fall asleep. Again. Ad infinitum. Of course, I realize that by
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
much of what Kafka describes was already reality within his own lifetime and destined to become ever more “real” as clock and calendar spun forward (143). Surely, he was not the only insurance agent who recognized the absurdity of placing a value upon the loss of itemized human body parts. To reiterate, one does not have to be Franz Kafka to step outside of the machinations of the all-consuming bureaucracy and thereby see the bureaucracy for what it is. To do so, however—to step away from in order to see more closely—is certainly a function of the Kafkaesque. In 1961, for example, Daniel Boorstin asserted that “the machinery of information . . . brought into being a new substitute for the hero, who is the celebrity” (59-60). He writes about this phenomenon at length, and we should take special note of what he says, for we live in an age in which the problems he outlines have ballooned to cartoon proportions: It is hardly surprising then that magazine and newspaper readers no longer find the lives of their heroes instructive. Popular biographies can offer very little in the way of solid information. For the subjects are themselves mere figments of the media. If
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
speaking this sentence, I am already headed down the wrong road. One evening—upon sighting an enormous roach scurrying across the floor—I snag a sheaf of stapled-together computer printouts from the nightstand and smash the vermin in imitation of a Stanley Kubrick caveman. Sleep is innate; there is no remembering how to fall asleep, because if one remembers that means (s)he was not involved in the process of doing it. The sheaf of papers comprises class readings for the Kafkaesque seminar: sections from Michael Hofmann’s translations of Kafka’s posthumously published short fiction, Guy Davenport’s essay on
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
their lives are empty of drama or achievement, it is only as we might have expected, for they are not known for drama or achievement. They are celebrities. Their chief
claim to fame is their fame itself. They are notorious for their notoriety. If this is puzzling or fantastic, if it is mere tautology, it is no more puzzling or fantastic or tautologous than much of the rest of our experience. Our experience tends more and more to become tautology—needless repetition of the same in different words and images. Perhaps what ails us is not so much a vice as a “nothingness.” The vacuum of our experience is actually made emptier by our anxious straining with mechanical devices to fill it artificially. What is remarkable is not only that we manage to fill experience with so much emptiness, but that we manage to give the emptiness such appealing variety (60).
In Kafka’s The Castle, K. becomes a celebrity in town: “there was no shortage of people who knew him, and this was even one of the main obstacles in his way” (258). In The Trial, Josef K. becomes notorious for his notoriety, as he is arrested “without having done anything
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“The Hunter Gracchus,” David Cronenberg’s introduction to the 2014 Susan Bernofsky translation of The Metamorphosis, etc. I ask myself how to let go. The roach leaves a stain like a nuclear shadow. I concentrate upon letting go. I can count the segments of its legs. I imagine my bed as a barque. It scuttles through the pages. The barque, the roach. I count chamois instead of sheep. Everything is in order; I am the Hunter Gracchus. Although I “lay stretched out on the skiff,” the ferryman has made a wrong turn, and I find myself “always on the wide staircase that leads” to sleep—but which never arrives at sleep itself. I am
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
wrong” (3). Yet the word “becoming” in each of the previous sentences misrepresents these characters who do not “become,” but simply are what they are. The idea of the tautology naturally gives way to the world of déjà vu. Theodor Adorno writes that each of Kafka’s sentences “says ‘interpret me,’ and none will permit it. Each compels the reaction, ‘that’s the way it is,’ and with it, the question, ‘where have I seen that before?’, the déjà vu is declared permanent” (246). This renders a dreamlike state where the tautologies become oxymoronic. The reader sees the phrase “of course” repeated often in Kafka’s sentences, sentences that—one after the other, of course—blatantly contradict preceding sentences. “It’s better that I ask,” explains the Hunter Gracchus, “even if I know everything” (55). The mayor, in turn, asks Gracchus if he is dead. “‘Yes,’ [says] the huntsman, ‘as you see’” (55).
Poor old Michael Finnegan.
Golden bullets lie scattered on the cracked asphalt in the world of the Kafkaesque:
· Readers and characters, alike, traverse distance on an anchorless treadmill that naturally travels opposite the direction in which the walker walks.
· The oxymoronic tautology washes in déjà vu waves on the impotent man who suffers simultaneously from a messianic complex.
· Existence persists on the threshold, and one finds oneself an insomniac: unable to return to the world from which one came, unable to transition into the next.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
sometimes “further down, sometimes right, sometimes left, always in motion,” but—of course—motionless. Begin Again.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Prisms. Translated by Samuel and Shierry Webber. MIT Press, 1982.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. Edited by Hannah Arendt, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.
Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A guide to Pseudo-Events in America. 25th Anniversary Edition, Vintage, 1992.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Kafka and his Precursors.” Selected Non-Fictions. Translated by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger, ed. Eliot Weinberger. Viking, 1999, pp. 363-65
Derrida, Jacques. “Before the Law.” Acts of Literature. Edited by Derek Attridge, Routledge, 1992, pp. 181-220.
Calasso, Roberto. K. Translated by Geoffery Brock, Vintage, 2005
Kafka, Franz. “A Report to an Academy.” Metamorphosis and Other Stories, translated by Michael Hoffman, Penguin, 2007.
---. “Homecoming.” Translated by Malcolm Pasley. (full citation needed)
---. “Texts on the Hunter Gracchus Theme.” The Burrow: Posthumously Published Short Fiction, translated by Michael Hoffman, Penguin,
---. The Castle. Translated by Mark Harman, Schocken, 1998.
---. “The Cares of a Family Man.” Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories. Edited by Nahum N. Glatzer, Schocken, 1971, pp. 427-29.
---. “The Neighbouring Village.” Metamorphosis and Other Stories, translated by Michael Hoffman, Penguin, 2007.
---. The Trial. Translated by Breon Mitchell, Schocken, 1998.
"Kafkaesque, adj." OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2017, www.oed.com/view/Entry/102331. Accessed 23 October 2017.
"manifesto, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2017, www.oed.com/view/Entry/113499. Accessed 23 October 2017.
McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. 1967. Ginko Press, 1996.
“Michael Finnigin.” The Oxford Song Book. Collected and arranged by Thomas Wood, vol. 2, Oxford UP, 1936, pp. 99.
Pasley, Malcolm. Afterward to the German Critical Edition. The Castle, by Franz Kafka, translated by Mark Harman, Schocken, 1998, pp. 318-21.
Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” 1881. Leaves of Grass and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts, Other Poetry and Prose, Criticism. Edited by Michael Moon, Norton, 2002, pp. 26-78.