By venturing into uncharted territory with sophistication, Caygill provides an insightful reexamination of well-known texts and he demonstrates the value of unfamiliar resources. Hopefully, Kafka: In light of the Accident will inspire future Kafka readers to explore and appreciate the role of accident and chance in his work.
The German Quarterly
A significant contribution to literature and the ... Read morephilosophy of the accident: it intricately interweaves a sociological account of modernity's differential distribution of chance, a reflection on art's illumination of the accidental beginning of defiance and a unique interpretation of Kafka's writing.
David Wylot
New Formations
Kafka's writings include legal briefs displaying his expertise in accident insurance together with his fiction, in which accidents are an obsessive theme. With philosophical imagination and scrupulous erudition, Howard Caygill explores this connection to produce fascinating new perspectives on both genres. His conceptual armature makes possible an especially profound and original reading of Kafka's In the Penal Colony. No reader of Caygill's Kafka will fail to be elated.
Stanley Corngold, Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature, Princeton University, USA Is this book a book? Is it a photograph rather? A film? Or a long parable? Exploring the very centre of Kafka's double life as an author and an insurance company employee, Caygill puts all genres at risk, thus engaging writing in a hazardous and splendid new metamorphosis.
Catherine Malabou, Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School, Switzerland No work on Kafka (or much else) I know of marries scholarly rigour so effortlessly to speculative risk. By placing at the centre of the corpus the accident, the question that links Kafka's unfamiliar daylight writing for the insurance industry to the night writing we know so well, Caygill discloses an unsuspected strain of defiance and unpredictability in a writer we've come to associate almost reflexively with the inexorable Law of the Father. The result is that impossible thing, a reading of Kafka as original as it is brilliant; you might want to insure yourself against falling off your chair.
Josh Cohen, Professor of Modern Literary Theory, English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths University of London, UK With a lucidity and scholarly depth that is characteristic of all his work, Howard Caygill offers what many might have thought impossible: an original interpretation of Kafka's work. Connecting together the day time writer of insurance reports with the night time writer of fictions, Caygill reveals how Kafka's work is pervaded by an uncanny encounter with the necessity of accidents. Kafka:in Light of the Accident is an exceptional work of both philosophy and criticism. It enables us to understand how radical a writer Kafka is, one whose true modernity we are only just beginning to discover.
Jon Cook, Emeritus Professor, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, UK Show Less