Franz Kafka’s writings are widely discussed in the US-American German cultural and literary studies in regards to such concepts as identity, hybridity, multilingualism, myth, etc. This presentation takes a different angle and examines how Claus Altmayer’s concept of ‘Deutungsmuster’ (patterns of interpretation) within the field of ‘Kulturwissenschaften/Landeskunde’ in German as a Foreign Language, and Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of ‘habitus’, ‘field’ and ‘practice’ can help to cast a critically transcultural light on Kafka’s Das Schloß.
It will be argued that Kafka’s writerly indefiniteness and abstractness become specially telling when applying the technique ‘Deutungsmusteranalyse’ to Das Schloß and closely examining the concepts ‘Schloss’ and ‘Brücke’. They can be seen as sites of transcultural negotiation among cultural powers. Throughout the text, Kafka breaks and reestablishes, and thus challenges the reader’s ‘Deutungsmuster’ as well as real and imaginary borders. The fight for ‘Deutungsmacht’ (power of meaning) is never-ending and cultural boundaries of interpretation are blurred.
In the presentation I will address the following questions:
- How do disciplinary norms of ‘Kulturwissenschaften/Landeskunde’ in German as a Foreign Language relate to French social theory and US-German studies in the analysis of literary texts?
- How can one use Altmayer’s cultural concept of ‘Deutungsmuster’ to analyse a literary text?
- What does Das Schloss tell us about the very nature and structure of borders and transculturality?
