The students usually end up engaged here, which is great; but the teacher still sort of writhes with guilt, because the comedy-as-literalization-of-metaphor tactic doesn’t begin to countenance the deeper alchemy by which Kafka’s comedy is always also tragedy, and this tragedy always also an immense and reverent joy. This usually leads to an excruciating hour during which I backpedal and hedge and warn students that, for all their wit and exformative voltage, Kafka’s stories are not fundamentally jokes, and that the rather simple and lugubrious gallows humor that marks so many of Kafka’s
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