Kafka: An End or a Beginning?

For those of us who have positioned their residences underneath rocks: is there a link to this?

A nice companion to the other thread where people are saying that the government shouldn't pay to educate their citizens in the liberal arts :P ...

So ???

My problem with shunting Kafka into post-modernism is it becomes too much a grab bag. Just like they try to vacuum up Cervantes and Sterne, aswell. Kakfa died 40 years before post-modernism; (and Cervantes 343 and Sterne 191).

But it brings to my mind a broader point: McHale's notion:

   intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain 
   point ontological plurality or instability: push epistemological 
   questions far enough and they "tip over" into ontological questions.
   

(I personally prefer the epistemological/ontological definition of modernism/post-modernism, especially here where we have Kakfa who could best be define (if anything) as a modernist writer being shoved into post-modern space.)

So is the shunting of a collective and ancient epistemological and ontological uncertainty an attempt to neutralize its implications? A question I think partly arises from something about your use of 'uncertainty' and 'unformed' here, which keeps occurring to me in terms of the excess of its vital substance and becoming: too much certainty/too much form tipping over into no certainty at all/formlessness. Just as defining the question (and no matter what anyone else argues Hitchhiker's Guide is my favorite example of this in fiction) for the answer of '42' as 'How many roads must a man walk down?' provides a solution, is it any more than a placebo affect? that at its core highlights the instability of our epistemological and ontological positions more intensely than a blank answer would have (and thereby beats us all over the head with a teleological hammer).

Apparently to some folks and the rules of this place, people can post things that are fairly interesting. So -shrugs-

I think Franz Kafka is lot more interesting than yet another Apache Java project.

Because an employed engineer is such a higher form of existence

A bit of both. Count me as an employed procrastinating philosopher.

Please don't post this sort of swipe. It's fine if you're uninterested in (Franz) Kafka; plenty of the rest of us are, and the submission is perfectly on topic.

It's in HN's DNA (not to mention the opening paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) that it covers a wide range of topics, far beyond just computing, tech, and startups and definitely including arts and letters, among other things. Historical material is welcome too.

Acting like the rarer species should be wiped out is a lame way to treat this site.

Wow. I'd like to see you solve the dining philosophers problem without a robust distributed messaging system.

Good coders know what they are doing is applied philosophy.