Aping the Ape: Kafka's "Report to an Academy"

Ziad Magdy Elmarsafy

doi:10.4148/2334-4415.1368

Aping the Ape: Kafka's "Report to an Academy"

Ziad Magdy Elmarsafy

Languages, Literatures and Cultures

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Abstract

The "Report to an Academy" narrates a curious situation: an ape presents (or rather, performs) a report to an academy. What he presents is an autobiography. Like so much in Kafka, the "Report" is a parable about writing in general and about the writer's identity in particular. This essay attempts to address these issues through a close reading of Kafka's text against Blanchot's L'espace littéraire. Central to this endeavour is an analysis of the ape's use of the first-person pronoun as someone who fashions himself while, at the same time, presenting a theatrical autobiography featuring the self in question. My reading then moves on to analyze the act of writing as a negotiation of the passage between self and other, framed as it is by the theatrical context of Kafka's parable.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	159-170
Number of pages	12
Journal	STUDIES IN TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE
Volume	19
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1368
Publication status	Published - 1995

Keywords

Franz Kafka
Maurice Blanchot
Selfhood
Identity
German Literature

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Aping the Ape_ELMARSAFY_Published 1995_GOLD VoRFinal published version, 2.83 MBLicence: CC BY-NC-ND

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Aping the Ape: Kafka's "Report to an Academy"

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