Kafka's Argumentative Analysis

In the first position paper entitled “Odysseus’ Scar and the Question of Literary Form,” I concluded that wartime autobiographical writings—including letters, diaries, testimonies, oral histories, etc.—is a literary genre that successfully mediates the personal and the documentary, the contemporary immediacy and the broader history. This second position paper is an extension of the first one, looking into the tricky nature of autobiographical texts as a fragmentary literary genre. It argues that while fragmentary writings are famously celebrated in postmodernist thoughts for its potential to break through authority, it can also be as easily exploited by a unified discourse exactly because it is fragmentary, which made it more fragile to rewriting and reinterpretation.
This paper—again—contrasts Said’s celebration of essay as a genre suitable for criticism, and Deleuze and Guattari’s ahistorical appropriation of Kafka’s letter to construct their own theory of “minor literature.” The paper ended with an example of the the Shanghai Jewish Museum, which by appropriating and reinterpreting testimonies of former Jewish refugees to create the myth of “Shanghai Ark,” unfolding and concealing history at the same time.
Kafka or Minor Literature has been …show more content…
What we would like to argue for the moment is that it is the nature of letters that makes this appropriation possible.
In “Kafka on Minor Literature”, Lowell Edmunds conducted careful textual analysis of Kafka’s letters, based upon which Deleuze and Guattari draw the three characters of “minor literature”: 1) A minor literature is constructed within a major language, by using the language in a deterriorialized way; 2) Minor literature is political. 3) Minor literature is