¿Kafkaesque¿. On tense and aspect in Franz Kafka¿s ¿A Country Doctor¿ and ¿The Burrow¿

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Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, grade: 2, 7, University of Cologne, language: English, abstract: This paper will put its focus on tense and aspect and how the German-speaking writer Franz Kafka availed himself of these particular functions to achieve his goals he pursued with his texts: to puzzle the reader and to leave him wondering about what to believe is the reality they are living in. The first section of this paper will be dealing with the general terminology and briefly explain the terms tense and aspect which will be crucial and essential to the understanding. Tense will then again be split up into past tense and the (historical) present tense. After that, there will be a short depiction of Franz Kafkäs life and work, followed by rough summaries of his works ¿A Country Doctor¿ as well as ¿The Burrow¿ on which the focus will be put to demonstrate how tense and aspect are used in order to achieve his goals with the reader. The main part of this paper will be on the usage of said focus on tense and aspect in Kafkäs work. The terminology out of section (2) will be picked up and be put into connection and context with the two stories of Kafkäs to demonstrate how Kafkäs world works and what makes it so difficult to tell his (fictional) world apart from the one that the reader knows as reality. The key question shall be what the peculiar usage of tense and aspect is which is a distinct feature of Kafkäs texts affects the reader, and how they make the reader think about what he is reading or if he even realizes what is going on as far as tense and aspect is concerned. Is he able to process this flood of information that is headed his way? We will see that there is plenty to think about, plenty to take into account when reading both The Burrow and A Country Doctor.