Abstract

This study focuses on texts by Einstein, Kafka, and Benjamin which reflect upon the relationship between modernist aesthetic forms and an earlier realist literary tradition. Modernism identifies 19th century realist narratives as an institutionalized art form that maintained an opposition between representational art on the one hand and an outside reality on the other. The opening chapter examines the expressionist literary movement's experimentation with non-chronological structures and with language in its attempt to declare a new political function for art in modern society. The following chapter provides a reading of Einstein's early novel Bebuquin as an exemplary expressionist text in its desire to break definitively with earlier artistic traditions. Einstein experiments with a fragmentary form that seeks to overcome the dualistic logic of the past and in doing so, also reflects upon a paradox that I claim extends to modernism as a whole: in attempting to overcome the dualistic logic of the past, his avant-garde text inadvertently affirms a new set of oppositions by identifying itself as a fragmentary, nonlinear "anti-narrative" pitted against an ostensibly unified realist form. ;In the subsequent two chapters on Kafka, I seek to identify narratives that break out of this deadlock between modernism and realism. I analyze fragments and short stories by Kafka together with contemporary essays on narrative theory that are specifically concerned with problems of temporal structure. Kafka's texts destabilize the opposition between modernist and realist art forms by exposing the epistemological concerns that underlie both. His texts allow for a critique of time and subject identity as manifested through narrative production. The closing chapter centers around Benjamin's essay on Kafka within the context of Benjamin's diverse theories of language, translation, and historical materialism as outlined in such works as "Task of the Translator" and One-Way Street. I argue that Benjamin builds upon Kafka's critique of the subject and time by developing a notion of history which takes into account both continuity and rupture. His text establishes historical connections to Kafka's work while resisting the impulse to stabilize texts through a notion of one unified tradition