Kafka Beyond the Minor: Crisis Literature and the Limits of Representation

This article critically reconsiders Franz Kafka’s position within the theory of minor literature as developed by Deleuze and Guattari, arguing that Kafka’s work resists the model’s core criteria that includes deterritorialized language, political immediacy, and collective enunciation. While Kafka is often celebrated as a typical ‘minor’ author writing from the margins of empire and language, this essay contends that his fiction reflects existential crisis instead of political resistance. Through a close reading of Kafka’s prose, supported by the theoretical interventions of Pascale Casanova, Milan Kundera, and Gayatri Spivak, the article challenges the theoretical overreach of applying collectivist frameworks to Kafka’s radically singular and metaphysically isolated protagonists. By examining Kafka’s position in the world literary canon, from Goethe’s concept of ‘Weltliteratur’ to Casanova’s ‘Greenwich meridian of literature’, the study reframes Kafka as a writer of crisis literature. Kafka’s bureaucratic absurdism, formal austerity, and existential alienation point toward the dissolution of meaning itself. The article argues that Kafka’s value in an age of global crisis lies in his ability to reveal the fractures within all systems of representation. Ultimately, this re-evaluation calls for a more nuanced and flexible understanding of marginality in world literature that may distinguish between visible aesthetic singularity and genuine subaltern silence. Kafka offers a model of metaphysical disorientation which is an essential position in literature shaped by crisis rather than certainty. Thus, this study aims to provide a new perspective on world literature discussions by considering Kafka’s writing as an existential breaking point.