Purified Masculinity. Kafka,s Humorous Preparation for Up-to-date Maleness

Abstract

The short piece of prose, Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor, shall be read on the basis of the gender status of its protagonists in order to provide the reader with information about the position within the identity discourse of masculinity. First, the genealogy of the category “bachelor” is described and distinguished from the concepts that follow it, such as “youngling”, “eccentric” and “single” trying to Kafka’s “bachelor” in an attempt of making, on  the basis of gernder fantasies of modernity, the Kafkian term “bachelor” tangible as a key term of his statement on the revolution of sexual imaginations in the industrial age. Through the instrumentalisation of the bachelor, a path is taken that unifies both Concepts apart from an escapist search for utopia , bourgeois origins and an avant-garde world destruction. If Kafka creates a completely non-decadent, but sober-structuralist world of art of male desires, the boundless sense of humor becomes a supporting pillar of making the criticism of the bachelor as the prototype of the rationalized man of the 20th Century bearable.