Utopia, Modernism, and Failure: On Franz Kafka’s Impossibilities

Abstract: With few exceptions, Franz Kafka’s work has been read as deeply dystopian. This essay undertakes an examination of Kafka’s references to the utopian imaginary, from his Diaries to the Zürau Notebooks, and from the story “Fellowship” to Amerika and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”, demonstrating that Kafka was both conscious of and interested in the rhetoric associated with utopian (or “intentional”) communities and in the parameters of utopia as a genre of writing. Rather than either advocating or rejecting utopia/nism, Kafka uses it as a means through which to develop, within his writing, a way of investigating the social and ideological problem of community—particularly acute for him as a multiply estranged European Jew—and the aesthetic problems of impossibility and failure.