Michelle Woods

Kafka comics: Kafka and his work in the graphic novel and anime film

Since R. Crumb’s iconic 1993 Introducing Kafka, several graphic novel versions of Kafka’s work have appeared: Mairowitz’s and Montellier’s The Trial; Mairowitz’s and Jaromir 99’s The Castle; Peter Kuper’s The Metamorphosis and Give It Up and Other Short Stories; Conley, Thomas and Barwin’s Franzlations; Roth and Eason’s illustrated children’s book, My First Kafka; and the anime short, Koji Yamamura’s Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor. Using Lawrence Venuti’s theory of interpretants in adaptation (2007), this paper will explore whether these works – though potentially pictorially reductive – might be an entry into re-interpreting Kafka and his writing for the 21^st century. It focuses on the visual conflation of Kafka with the characters in his work and suggests that this iconicized Kafka becomes a fictional translator figure within the graphic novels.

Keywords: Kafka, the graphic novel, adaptation

Biography

Michelle Woods is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at SUNY, New Paltz. She holds a PhD in Literature (the translations of Milan Kundera’s Czech novels) from Trinity College, Dublin and a BA Hons in English and Russian from Trinity College, Dublin. She was acting Director of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies at Dublin City University (2004-5) and is a co-editor for the new Bloomsbury Translation Studies series: Literatures, Cultures, Translation. Woods is the author of Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka (2013), Censoring Translation: Censorship, Theatre and the Politics of Translation (2012), and Translating Milan Kundera (2006).