Freedom and confinement in modernity

by Aglaia Kiarina Kordela

Franz Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in modernity. Rather, it allows Kafka to perform a critique of a modernity that first posits a clear-cut opposition between confinement and freedom, and then sets up freedom as an ideal which, conceived in such absolute terms, is by definition unattainable.