An ongoing legal battle over the rights to unpublished papers by Franz Kafka
Scott Horton of
Harper's Magazine reports on the complex legal procedures surrounding recently unearthed manuscripts by Franz Kafka:
Franz Kafka’s The Trial revolves around a surrealistic legal procedure governed by a nontransparent logic. At times it seems a criticism of what scholars call “legal indeterminacy,” that is, the inability of the legal system to provide clear rules for decision. “The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other,” Kafka writes at one point. Now a set of manuscripts that at least at one point included the text of The Trial has become the subject of legal proceedings in Israel that seem as contradictory and interminable as the novel itself. [Read More]
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