Conspiracy Theorists Support Group: Franz Kafka's Short Stories

Feel the burden of your disappointment with the world wearing you down? Think the decisions and temperaments of those around you to be some prophecy of doom that shadows your every footstep? Tired of that mountain of contrived accident insurance claims? Does something sound abhorrent about taking over your brother’s asbestos factory? Asbestos? Does living life itself feel like you’re being forced to manage an asbestos factory?

Well folks, many of us feel like the world is either falling down around us, or melting away, as we find pools of pink slime at intermittently inopportune moments. Come join an association not of conspirators, but of those who see the conspiracies around us all too well. If you have nightmares of a creeping coup de etre, you'll find comfort in your fellows and the prescience of Franz Kafka's stories.

There are many reasons to read Franz Kafka’s short stories and novels. I like them because they’re beautiful mashes of Poe and Orwell, and they make my stomach turn. We’ll read a selection of the most subtely ghastly and noxious Kafka stories, find the source of his soul’s mania, dabble in the existentialist philosophy of the day, and share our own conspiracy thories. Through this we will gain a greater understanding of one of the 20th century’s great writers, and share our own knowledge of what we believe makes this country world existence rot, e.g. that growing Charybdis of trash in the Pacific or the private sector absorption of public education.

"To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility."
Franz Kafka - December 4, 1913

Teacher: Mark Duhaime: moc.liamg|qse.emiahud#moc.liamg|qse.emiahud
Location: Either at my apartment, Boston Public Library, charmingly calming tea emporium, or Starbucks Coffee Shop
Time: Most likely Wednesday evenings, for a half semester until the end of June

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