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Can we laugh reading Kafka and, if so, what are we laughing about? What in us laughs whilst The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, The Trial and The Castle are so widely reputed as nightmarish? Setting aside the serious mindset that allegorizes Kafka's novels, some critics also extoll a comic force in Kafka that still contains the metaphysical intent. This laughter arises unexpectedly, like a radical, heterodox offshoot, derived from the Talmudic tradition and the notion of an arms-length God, delegating to mankind the administration of the world, for better or for worse (and just for laughs too), to fend for themselves in their human quibbling. Walter Benjamin surely meant this when he wrote to Gershom Scholem: “I think the key to Kafka's work is likely to fall into the hands of the person who is able to extract the comic aspects from Jewish theology.”
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AbstractIn the Francophonie, feelings of belonging—or not belonging—to a group have so many variables that we must question whether we want to understand how discourse about literature works from a pragmatic point of view, one that relates the production of texts to the context in which they are read. These relationships are particularly important since Francophone literatures are the only ones in North America that have not reversed the dialectic of the centre and the periphery in their favour. In this context, the issue of their status, or their designation, if you prefer, cannot be avoided. Francophone literatures have been designated regional, peripheral or minor, in turn. But the concept of a minor literature, in the sense used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is an odd amalgam of some of Franz Kafka's ideas about literatures then emerging and his situation as a Jewish writer living in Prague and writing in German. This article discusses this concept as well as the notion of a little literature (kleine Litteratur) put forward by Kafka and later by Milan Kundera, a notion to which it seems necessary to add that of minority literature in order to point out some common elements but also some disparities in the situation of North American Francophone literatures.