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In Kafka and Wittgenstein, Rebecca Schuman argues that the search for what Kafka means is "sorely mistaken" (5). In fact, "the problems and illusions we portend to uncover, the important questions we attempt to answer-Is Josef K. guilty? If so, of what? What does Gregor Samsa's transformed body mean? Is Land Surveyor K. a real land surveyor or not?-themselves presuppose a bigger delusion: that such questions can be asked in the first place" (5). This exposure of the bigger delusion hiding behind the smaller, more obvious one, and of questions that cannot be asked, is a common thread Schuman finds in the works of Kafka and Wittgenstein-the unusual pairing that structures this book. By reading the two alongside each other and breaking down the usual divide between analytic philosophy and literature, Schuman argues that, "Kafka undermines several pretenses about prose narration in much the same way Wittgenstein undermines the pretense of philosophical progress" (11).
In doing so, Schuman makes a convincing case for a new way of thinking about modernism that brings together arguably the most important philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century with the most important literary author of that same time period to show that "logical modernism belongs with modernist studies" (39). If one has a strong aversion to the likes of symbolic...