Kafka’s Animal Stories: Modernist Form and Interspecies Narrative

Abstract

Kafka’s animal stories, especially “The Metamorphosis” and “A Report to an Academy,” have been of great interest to the interdisciplinary field of animal studies. A number of works in literary animal studies have used the complexity of Kafka’s stories to discuss such topics of current interest as crossing the human-animal divide, what we can and cannot know of what it is to be another animal, how writing from the point of view of a nonhuman animal can both provide possible exits from the solipsism of the modern or bourgeois subject and also shift our own understanding of human subjectivity, ontology, epistemology, and limitation; also, how thinking about these stories, and animal literature in general, can serve the goal of decentering anthropocentrism.1