Teaching Kafka a Hundred Years After His Death
Why his work can still resonate with young people
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. He lay on his armor-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.
-Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (translated by Ian Johnston)1
Today is the 100th anniversary of Franz Kafka’s death.
A few days ago, the New York Times posted an interesting piece by Amanda Hess about Kafka’s resurgence as a kind of ironic (?) TikTok leading man. As someone who read The Metamorphosis with teenagers many times over the last several years of my teaching career— including during our extremely Kafkaesque online year— I wasn’t surprise…
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