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Orienting Nietzsche's "Nearest Things" in Kafka's Letters to Felice
- Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal
- Mosaic, an interdisciplinary critical journal
- Volume 50, Number 3, September 2017
- pp. 19-34
- 10.1353/mos.2017.a668739
- Article
- Additional Information
Franz Kafka's five-year correspondence with Felice Bauer is marked by an unusual fascination with the practice of writing and receiving letters and with the minutiae of the everyday. I suggest that Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of the "nearest things" illuminates Kafka's letter-writing as an embodied style or "orientation" of thought.