This article explores Walter Benjamin's famous concept of the aura in relation to his writings on photography. Although Benjamin's “Artwork” essay charges photography with the decline of the aura of the traditional artwork, his essay on photography complicates this historical narrative, associating aura with early portrait photography but also with its successor, the commercial studio portrait. The childhood photograph of Franz Kafka, whose melancholy air serves Benjamin as an example of a paradoxical, post-auratic aura, recurs in his childhood memoirs, where the narrator projects himself into this picture. Benjamin's writings on photography thus develop an alternative concept of aura, one which transcends fixed historical or technological categories through the model of an imaginary encounter between viewer and image. This conception has far-reaching consequences not only for the theory of photography but also for its role within literature, as is suggested by Benjamin's empathetic engagement with the Kafka photograph and its incorporation into his own life story.

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Beauty plays a central but ambivalent role in Sebald's writings. Echoing Kant's aesthetic theory, Sebald's texts emphasise the disinterested and free nature of aesthetic pleasure, but they also argue that this pleasure is increasingly threatened in the modern age, as the human relationship towards nature becomes informed by a desire for domination and exploitation. In a cross-reading of Sebald's literary works and his essays on Adalbert Stifter and Gottfried Keller, this article shows how Sebald's own texts attempt to resist this development. By highlighting the beauty of the natural world, they prepare the ground for renewed appreciation, but also for encounter and compassion. Yet the beauty thus displayed is often situated within the context of suffering and death, and by depicting it, Sebald's texts risk becoming complicit with the very structures which they try to undermine. A similar complicity between pleasure and domination also shapes the realm of man-made artefacts. Sebald's texts attempt to escape this double-bind in passages which abandon conventionally realist representation in favour of more abstract tableaux of beautiful patterns and colours. This movement towards abstraction serves to shield beauty from the dictates of instrumental reason, fostering an aesthetic pleasure which remains open to compassion.Kant's aesthetic theory is a theory of pleasure. In his Kritik der Urteilskraft, he famously divides human pleasure into three categories, distinguishing the enjoyment we derive from the beautiful from the kinds of pleasure created by other experiences, such as the agreeable and the good. 1 As Kant argues, only aesthetic pleasure is truly disinterested, in that it depends neither on the body -on our subjective tastes and preferences, nor on reason -on logical arguments or explanations: Man kann sagen: daß unter allen diesen drei Arten des Wohlgefallens das des Geschmacks am Schönen einzig und allein ein uninteressirtes und freies Wohlgefallen sei; denn kein Interesse, weder das der Sinne, noch das der Vernunft, zwingt den Beifall ab (KdU , p. 210). 2

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) is one of the most influential of modern authors, whose darkly fascinating novels and stories - where themes such as power, punishment and alienation loom large - have become emblematic of modern life. This Introduction offers a clear and accessible account of Kafka's life, work and literary influence and overturns many myths surrounding them. His texts are in fact far more engaging, diverse, light-hearted and ironic than is commonly suggested by clichés of 'the Kafkaesque'. And, once explored in detail, they are less difficult and impenetrable than is often assumed. Through close analysis of their style, imagery and narrative perspective, Carolin Duttlinger aims to give readers the confidence to (re-)discover Kafka's works without constant recourse to the mantras of critical orthodoxy. In addition, she situates Kafka's texts within their wider cultural, historical and political contexts illustrating how they respond to the concerns of their age, and of our own.