TY - JOUR T1 - Kafka’s Test JF - Monatshefte SP - 372 LP - 384 DO - 10.1353/mon.2011.0096 VL - 103 IS - 3 AU - Christiane Frey A2 - Corngold, Stanley Jennings, Michael Y1 - 2011/09/21 UR - http://mon.uwpress.org/content/103/3/372.abstract N2 - This essay offers a reading of Kafka’s long-ignored short narrative piece “Die Prüfung” (1920), uncovering the paradoxes of testing that the curious ending of the text exposes. Confronting the parable first with Brod’s Heidentum, Christentum, Judentum and second with one of the most widely discussed of Kafka’s parables, namely “Vor dem Gesetz,” the essay explores Kafka’s reconfigurations of the intricate relationship between grace and sin, calling and serving, the law and the examination. The essay concludes by showing how the pedagogical and psychological discourse of “testing” circa 1920 was concerned with an epistemic problematic that is very much in evidence in Kafka’s parable. (CF) ER -