Publisher's Synopsis
This collection of essays makes available a selection of the papers given at the symposium held in 1983 at the Institute of Germanic Studies on the occasion of the centenary of Kafka's birth. The interest Kafka's work continues to evoke in circumstances he hardly envisaged, the fascination it continues to exert on readers whose ways and views of life are very different from the ways and views of the world in which he wrote all suggest that interpretations which are fussy with claims to totality or definitiveness are likely to end up by being more misleading than the scrutinies of individual themes and stories and the searching out of discrete meanings - the limited truths that have been attempted in this volume. The contributions offer neither one nor several 'definitive' overall interpretations, but leave it to the reader to decide which are paths and which are labyrinths.
