Aaron Schuster at the MIT Press Reader:
Written toward the end of Franz Kafka’s life, “Investigations of a Dog” is one of the lesser-known and most enigmatic works in the author’s oeuvre. Kafka didn’t give the story a title, writing it in the autumn of 1922 but leaving it unpublished and unfinished. It was published posthumously in 1931 in a collection edited by his friend and biographer Max Brod, who named it Forschungen eines Hundes — which could also be translated as “Researches of a Dog,” to give it a more academic ring.
The name Kafka is popularly associated with the horrors of a grotesquely impenetrable legal system, but there is another aspect to his work, which concerns knowledge. “Investigations of a Dog” presents a brilliant and sometimes hilarious parody of the world of knowledge production, what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called “the university discourse.” And the contemporary academy might easily be qualified as Kafkaesque, with its nonsensical rankings and evaluations, market-driven imperatives, and exploding administrative ranks.
More here.
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