Dailies frantz biography definition

Bohemian writer (1883–1924)

"Kafka" redirects here. For other uses, see Kafka (disambiguation).

Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a Jewish Austrian-Czech novelist and writer from Prague who wrote in German. He is widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, and typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the novella The Metamorphosis (1915) and the novels The Trial (1924) and The Castle (1926). The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.

Kafka was born into a middle-class German- and Yiddish-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which belonged to the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today the capital of the Czech Republic, also known as Czechia). He trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education was employed full-time in various legal and insurance jobs. Being employed full-time forced Kafka to relegate writing to his spare time. Few of his works were published during his lifetime; the story collections Contemplation (1912) and A Country Doctor (1919), and individual stories, such as his novella The Metamorphosis, were published in literary magazines, but they received little attention. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship. He became engaged to several women but never married. He died relatively unknown in 1924 of tuberculosis, at the age of 40.

Kafka was a prolific writer, but he bur

German-born American anthropologist (1858–1942)

Franz Uri Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. He was a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical particularism and cultural relativism.

Studying in Germany, Boas was awarded a doctorate in 1881 in physics while also studying geography. He then participated in a geographical expedition to northern Canada, where he became fascinated with the culture and language of the Baffin Island Inuit. He went on to do field work with the indigenous cultures and languages of the Pacific Northwest. In 1887 he emigrated to the United States, where he first worked as a museum curator at the Smithsonian, and in 1899 became a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his career. Through his students, many of whom went on to found anthropology departments and research programmes inspired by their mentor, Boas profoundly influenced the development of American anthropology. Among his many significant students were A. L. Kroeber, Alexander Goldenweiser, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gilberto Freyre.

Boas was one of the most prominent opponents of the then-popular ideologies of scientific racism, the idea that race is a biological concept and that human behavior is best understood through the typology of biological characteristics. In a series of groundbreaking studies of skeletal anatomy, he showed that cranial shape and size was highly malleable depending on environmental factors such as health and nutrition, in contrast to the claims by racial anthropologists of the day that held head shape to be a stable racial trait. Boas al

Fanon wrote about how the Black man, cowed by the colonists’ unprecedented mixture of greed, righteousness, and military efficacy, tended to internalize the demoralizing judgment delivered on him by the white gaze. “I start suffering from not being a white man,” Fanon wrote. “So I will try quite simply to make myself white.” But mimicry could be a cure worse than the disease, since it reinforced the existing racial hierarchy, thereby further devastating the Black man’s self-esteem. Inspired by Sartre, who had argued that the anti-Semite’s gaze created the Jew, Fanon concluded that Blackness was another constructed and imposed identity. “The black man is not,” he wrote in the closing pages of “Black Skin, White Masks.” “No more than the white man.”

This argument also underpins the political programs that Fanon proposes in “The Wretched of the Earth,” in which he argues that, because colonialism is “a systematized negation of the other,” it “forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: Who am I in reality?” By the time he wrote the book, however, his focus had shifted. “The misfortune of the colonized African masses, exploited, subjugated, is first of a vital, material order,” he wrote, against which the grievances of educated Black men like him did not appear as urgent. In a withering review, published in 1959, of Richard Wright’s “White Man, Listen” (1957), Fanon wrote that “the drama of consciousness of a westernized Black, torn between his white culture and his negritude,” while painful, does not “kill anyone.”

For much of “The Wretched of the Earth,” Fanon raises an issue that he thought Wright, obsessed with the existential crises of literary intellectuals, had ignored: how “to give back to the peoples of Africa the initiative of their history, and by which means.” Distrustful of the “Westernized” intelligentsia and urban working classes in the nationalist movements fighting for liberation, he saw the African peasantry as the true wretched of the ea