First-person and second-generation perspectives on starvation in Franz Kafka's 'Ein Hungerkünstler'

Journal article

An important claim made for second-generation accounts of cognition is that they help solve the problem of dualism, which arguably remains unchallenged in much literary criticism. Kafka's short story “Ein Hungerkunstler” (A Hunger Artist) is about a profoundly embodied experience of (unsuccessfully) denying embodiment: fasting to death. With this text's cognitive realism as my focal point, I use insights from second-generation cognitive science (which acknowledges the embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended nature of human cognition), including research on eating disorders and starvation, to provide purchase on two traditional literary-critical concerns: thematic interpretation and paradox. I also suggest that a first-person perspective which acknowledges the complexities of individual real-world embodiment may sometimes enrich cognitive literary studies. This combined first-person and second-generation methodology can help us recognize that for the real people who read our scholarship and learn from us, the dangers of dualism are ethically as well as interpretively profound.

Authors: Troscianko, ET

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Pennsylvania State University
• Journal: Style
• Volume: 48
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 331-348
• Publication date: 2014-09-01
• Acceptance date: 2013-10-31
• DOI: 10.5325/style.48.3.331
• EISSN: 2374-6629
• ISSN: 0039-4238
• Language: English