Kafka. A Paradigm for the Collective Imagination

Exactly a hundred years ago, lying on his deathbed in the Kierling sanatorium, Franz Kafka was proofreading a short story he had just finished, Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk 1 , which tells the story of a mouse who sings for the mouse folk gathered around to hear her during deeply beautiful and intense concerts.But her mouse singing, Kafka writes, can only come in the form of whistles and squeaks, barely audible sounds.Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis, which had infected his larynx and vocal cords.At the very end of his life, he could no longer utter a sound and was forced to use small notepads and postcards from the sanatorium in order to communicate.In a conversation with his friend and doctor Robert Klopstock, who watched over his final days, he mentioned Josephine, remarking: "I have started my study of animal squeaks just in time." 2 Kafka identified with Josephine, navigating the thin line between impossibility, his own end and beauty

Aesthetics · Art · Cognitive psychology · Epistemology · Imagination · Paradigm shift · Sociology · Franz Kafka Literary Studies · Philosophy · Psychology