La poética del cuerpo en los relatos de Franz Kafka ‘En la colonia penitenciaria’ (1919) y ‘La metamorfosis’ (1915)

Abstract

The crisis caused by the spreading modernity in the Centro-European societies towards the end of the 19th century gives way to the appearance of a German literature which has as its theme the manifest asynchrony between socio-political reality and the process of economical modernisation. The dawning of modernity finds its expression in Kafka’s body discourse, developed in his short novels “The metamorphose” and “In the penitentiary” as a criticism to the obsolete socio-political establishment, still persisting at the time of First World War. Kafka tries to formulate a new identity leaving behind the principles of an status quo, which is already incompatible with a modern sensibility. As a result, the arising modernity focuses on the formulation of a poetics about the body, where it figures as hostage or burden, with the subject’s psyche and sensibility exceeding its narrow limits. The body discourse promotes a perception of the reality questioning traditional narrative categories such as the authorial perspective or the principle of mimesis between extra-textual reality and fictive world. In reflection of the social order of the 19th century, this body discourse renders the traditional poetics of realism illegitimate in a pitiless way, opening the door to the development of a genuine and modern 20th century fiction, which tries to reflect the transformation of modern society and the individual.