TY  - CHAP
A1  - Castore, Antonio
T1  - Incomplete and self-dismantling structures : the built space, the text, the body
T2  - Errans : going astray, being adrift, coming to nothing / ed. by Christoph F.E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer ; Cultural Inquiry ; 24
N2  - The present essay engages with the short story 'The Burrow', written by Franz Kafka between 1923 and 1924, a few months before his death. The ambiguity of the original title, 'Der Bau', which defies translation by pointing at the same time at a construction and an excavation work, anticipates the multilayered image of the burrow itself. While both nature and function of the burrow are hard to pinpoint (is it a dwelling, a shelter, a fortress, a labyrinth, a ruin?), the initially reported success of its construction is revealed as illusory, thus prompting the ongoing first-person narration of the incessant builder's work. Similarly unsuccessful is any attempt of the reader to attain metaphorical closure. In the light of other impossible, i.e., unfinished, bound-to-fail, ruinous, or selfdismantling structures portrayed by Kafka, as well as on the background of coeval texts by Paul Valéry and Georg Simmel, the essay investigates the wide and deep significance of the burrow’s countering the classical ideal of architectural wholeness.
KW  - Kafka, Franz
KW  - Der Bau
KW  - Valéry, Paul
KW  - Eupalinos
KW  - Vitruvius
KW  - De architectura
KW  - Architektur
KW  - Struktur
KW  - Ruine
KW  - Unvollständigkeit
KW  - Incompleteness
KW  - Ruins
KW  - Fragmentation (Philosophy) in literature
KW  - Architecture and literature
Y1  - 2022
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/70516
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-705164
UR  - https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-24/castore_self-dismantling-structures.pdf
SN  - 978-3-96558-037-4
SN  - 978-3-96558-038-1
SN  - 2627-731X
SP  - 94
EP  - 112
PB  - ICI Press
CY  - Berlin
ER  -