Assignment for Wednesday 1 April

As requested, here are the notes I made in preparation for today’s class.

Journal posting. Topic: Name a couple of ways in which Welles’s The Trial is a Kafkaesque work… or NOT a Kafkaesque work. To answer this, you’ll need to cite specific “pieces” of the movie (which probably means watching parts of it again).

Refer to the definition of the Kafkaesque we generated in class based on your essays. (Here’s a visual representation.)

Pieces we’ve talked about in class that might help you craft your answer:

• the nature of the court and the law
• the status of other people: are they there to help or hinder? (inspector, thugs, Hastler, Titorelli, girls, Leni, uncle, cousin Irmie, etc.)
• film noir elements: shadow & light (chiaroscuro), geometric shapes, femme fatale, violence, moral ambiguity
• violations of realist conventions, e.g. the quick shifts from one physical space to another (geographical ambiguity), huge and imposing physical structures, bizarre office landscape
• the sense of being rooted in everyday experience, while also totally outside the everyday
• K.’s attitude towards his trial and the court
• the role of women; the role of (homo)sexuality
• ambiguity or the lack of it
• social and political commentary

You have full freedom to introduce other ideas, themes, concepts.

Note that the process of answering this question — i.e. marshaling evidence for or against the idea that something is Kafkaesque — is similar to the process of writing your semester project, so today’s assignment will help you in that regard.

~ by swindham on March 30, 2009.