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Adjective, Nine Letters, Describes All Allegories

Kafka comes into the Comment of the Week

by
Marc Tracy
June 01, 2012
(Ravi Joshi/Tablet Magazine)
(Ravi Joshi/Tablet Magazine)

Winner gets a free Nextbook Press book appropriate to his or her comment (if he or she emails me at [email protected] with his or her mailing address).

This week’s winner is Jacob Arnon, who wrote, perhaps taking issue with my explicitly Kafkaesque gloss on the battle over Franz Kafka’s papers, “This is too easy to use a Kafka allegory to describe the fate of his own writing. Allegories are always a two way street. You can argue a point as well as it opposite.”

Arnon’s point about the ambiguity of allegory is very, well, Kafkaesque, no? He gets (surprise, surprise) Rodger Kamenetz’ meditation on Kafka and Reb Nachman, Burnt Books.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.