Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language

Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language traces the writer Franz Kafka’s interest in modern art and visual culture. Examining Kafka’s relationship to visuality, the book explores the diversity of images that surrounded Kafka in his home city of Prague—a heterogeneous and multilingual metropolis whose visual environment shaped his everyday experiences. It maps how Kafka engaged with local painting and sculpture, architecture, and monuments, and also with an array of popular visual media and phenomena from illustrated magazines and advertising to film, photography, dance, and cabaret. Kafka’s attention to the modern visual culture of his era was reflected in his writings and in his interest in drawing, a practice in which he received preliminary training and which he took up in his free time during his years as a university student.