Corngold

Wagner's laborious exposition of what Corngold meant by Kafka's gnosticism boils down to another quibble, this time over "transcendental essence."

'Kafka Up Close': An Exchange Corngold, Stanley 2005

In many pages of protracted rumination, Corngold intermixed his own insights with already enigmatic passages from Kafka, thus producing (often specious) effects of "chiasmus" yielding a "boundless field of incessant metaphorical exchange" (p. 121), a "free play between given metaphors which accommodates new metaphors at the same time that it robs each of determinate meaning" (p. 123), and "a movement of thought that spirals on through endless reversals" (p. 153).

'Kafka Up Close': An Exchange Corngold, Stanley 2005

And though Corngold is properly chagrined by the revelation of de Man's early service to Hitler, he points out in seeming mitigation that de Man had at least exempted a certain "Kafha" from the Jewish cultural rot that the young Belgian journalist joined the Nazis in denouncing (p. 201).

'Kafka Up Close': An Exchange Corngold, Stanley 2005

"My understanding of Kafka's fiction," wrote Corngold in Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form, is of an enterprise that aims to engage to the limit the being wholly centered on writing ....

'Kafka Up Close': An Exchange Corngold, Stanley 2005

Rather than try to justify that slur or any of the other distortions that I named, Corngold now pretends that he treated both Boa and Gilman with the utmost collegial generosity.

'Kafka Up Close': An Exchange Corngold, Stanley 2005

It may be time for Professor Corngold to think a little harder about "purity" — Kafka's, de Man's, but most of all his own.

'Kafka Up Close': An Exchange Corngold, Stanley 2005

In a similarly casual manner, Crews quotes Corngold's verdict that "for [Sander] Gilman, Kafka is not anti-Semitic enough" — a phrase that in isolation looks absurd, as if Corngold were saying that Gilman believed that Kafka himself was an anti-Semite who would have been better off had he been more of one.

'Kafka Up Close': An Exchange Corngold, Stanley 2005

Corngold denies that I had grounds for saying that his Lambent Traces pillories Elizabeth Boa and Sander Gilman as crude exemplars of antiliterary "cultural studies."

'Kafka Up Close': An Exchange Corngold, Stanley 2005

Readers of Lambent Traces will find Corngold wavering between the two senses of gnosticism explained by Wagner.

'Kafka Up Close': An Exchange Corngold, Stanley 2005

I gather that Corngold rejects any imputation that Kafka was posthumously recruited to the cause of anticommunism after World War II.

'Kafka Up Close': An Exchange Corngold, Stanley 2005