The document provides an agenda for an EWRT 1C class. It includes a writing workshop to discuss a draft essay, a discussion of The Metamorphosis including historical context, literary style, themes and characters. Students will exchange papers and provide feedback following guidelines. One student summarizes chapter one which describes Gregor Samsa waking up as a cockroach late for work.

1. EWRT 1C Class 23

2. AGENDA
 Writing Workshop: Essay #
2
 You need two copies of
your essay for this
exercise.
 Discussion The
Metamorphosis
 Historical Context
 Literary Style
 Themes and Characters

3. Writers: On the back of the drafts you
brought for your readers, answer these
two questions:
1. Purpose: Here is what I hope to accomplish with my
readers:
1. Problem: Here is what I see as the single most
important problem with this draft; please keep this in
mind as you read through my paper:

4. Distributing your papers
Pass your papers to me. I will
pass them to readers so that
you get two responses to your
essay. When you complete your
first response, I will give you a
second essay to read. This will
ensure that each person gets at
least one complete review. The
goal is respond to the guideline
prompts without asking any
questions of the writer.

5. Directions
 Please read the writer’s answers to the two
questions we began with.
 Please follow the guidelines on the handout.
 Respond thoroughly, but keep in mind that the goal
is to respond to two essays if you can.
 Return the essays to me your comments when you
finish.
 When you finish two essays, I will return your
essays with comments. Read them and consider the
advice.

6. Who can offer a
summary of chapter
one of The
Metamorphosis?

7. Summary Chapter One
Gregor Samson goes to bed one night
and wakes up, late for work, as a
cockroach. We learn that Gregor is a
traveling salesman. He hates his job but
feels obligated to perform it because of
his parents. They are indebted to his
boss, and because of their advanced age
it is left to Gregor to fulfill their debt.
He spends day after day at this work,
consumed yet unfulfilled. He has not
missed a day of work in five years.

8. Franz Kafka is one of the founders of modern literature.
His claim to greatness includes his service in completely collapsing
the aesthetic distance that had traditionally separated the writer from
the reader. In what is probably his most famous work of fiction, Die
Verwandlung (1915; translated as "Metamorphosis," 1936-1938), the
protagonist, Gregor Samsa, is presented to the reader as a man who
has become an insect; Gregor's condition is never suggested to be an
illusion or dream (although many critics have commented on its
dreamlike qualities). In his shock at the result of Kafka's unmediated
aesthetic distance, the reader is led to forgo his usual reflective and
explicative function. Kafka has his characters perform that explicative
function--hectically, repeatedly, self-contradictorily, and with a new
kind of irony that has come to characterize modern literature. Finally,
in an age that celebrates the mass, Kafka redirects the focus to the
individual. His characters stand for themselves as individuals; in the
case of the male protagonists--and almost all of his protagonists are
male--they stand for Kafka himself.

9. Historical Context
 For most of Kafka's lifetime, his home town of Prague was a Czech
city within a German-speaking empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Only at the end of World War I did that Empire disappear, leading to
the creation of an independent Czechoslovakia. But in 1912, when
Kafka was writing The Metamorphosis, the Czechs had not yet won
their independence, and despite its Czech majority, Prague was
dominated by a German-speaking elite. Recognizing where the power
lay in the city, the Jews of Prague tended to identify with the German
minority rather than with the Czech majority; the Czechs therefore
considered the Jews to be part of the German community, but the
Germans themselves did not. As a result, it was easy for the Jews to
feel that they did not fit in anywhere.
 In general, Prague was a city of ethnic tensions, primarily between
Czechs and Germans and between Czechs and Jews. In 1897, when
Kafka was fourteen, the tensions erupted into anti-Semitic riots started
by the Czechs. Thus Kafka would have grown up knowing hatred and
hostility as well as the difficulty of fitting in.

10. Literary
Style

11. Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and,
more importantly, can we trust her or him?
Third Person/Limited Omniscient
The story is mainly told through the perspective of Gregor
Samsa, as if the narrator were planted with Gregor's human
consciousness inside Gregor's insect body. We discover
aspects of Gregor's body as he himself discovers them. If he
itches, we don't know why until he looks to see what's making
him itch. If he's hungry, we don't know what he likes to eat until
he discovers his preference for rotten foods.

12. Technique
 This novella is an extended literalization of the implications
of the metaphor used in its initial sentence. Gregor is
metamorphosed into an insectlike species of vermin, with
Kafka careful not to identify the precise nature of Gregor’s
bughood. German usage applies Kafka’s term, Ungeziefer,
to contemptible, spineless, parasitic persons, akin to English
connotations of the work “cockroach.” Gregor’s passivity and
abjectness before authority link him with these meanings, as
Kafka develops the fable by transforming the metaphor back
into the imaginative reality of his fiction. After all, Gregor’s
metamorphosis constitutes a revelation of the truth
regarding his low self-esteem. It is a self-judgment by his
repressed and continually defeated humanity.

13. Themes and Characters
 Alienation
 Father-Son Antagonism
 Escapism
 Isolation
 Self-sacrifice
 Betrayal
 Gregor Samsa
 Grete Samsa
 Mr. Samsa
 Anna Samsa
 The Chief Clerk
 Three Lodgers
 Charwoman

14. HOMEWORK?
Again?
@#% !
Finish The Metamorphosis