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The article shows, through a close reading of the two first chapters of Kafka's novel "The Trial", that the irruption of the extraordinary and inexplicable in Kafka's text is demonstrated above all in a shift of the spatial order. The disturbance of K., the derangement of his habitual surrounding becomes readable not through his interiority, but rather in a literal de-rangement of interior spaces and of their objects that are presented in their exteriority.
An important motif of twentieth century fantastic literature is the exploration of a house or a room whose furniture and spatial organization are disconcerting. Such a motif is presumably symptomatic of a deep questioning on space structure understood according to Euclides and Newton ; it also echoes the anthropological crisis of the very notion of "place", a crisis mirrored in literature, visual arts and cinema, which can be deciphered in particular descriptive passages signaling the aporetic turn of narrative in fictions by J.-L. Borgès and André Pieyre de Mandiargues.
The article examines the textile trace that constitutes the spatial system and narrative of Gottfried Keller's "Regine"-novella (1881). Keller’s novella can be read as an example of a shift that takes place in the literary use of textiles in the nineteenth century. Until then textiles in literature - such as the veil or the weave - were mostly of metaphorical importance. Interlaced with socio-economical changes in production, distribution and consumption of textiles, this changed toward a more material approach. In a close reading of the novella, the article shows how Keller explores und undermines the suggestive and imaginative potential of fabrics while expounding the figures' struggle with the sheer materiality of their surroundings.