ABSTRACT
If we rephrase Deleuze and Guattari's tripartite definition, then, we may say that minor literature: (i) experiments with language; (ii) treats the world as a network of power relations; and (iii) opens possibilities for a people to come. What this means in concrete terms may perhaps best be approached by considering a bit further Deleuze and Guattari's handling of Kafka, the minor writer they examine most closely. They see Kafka's experimentation with language as arising from his situation as a Prague Jew speaking a deracinated, formal German that has been given a regional flavour through its contact with Czech speakers. Kafka's knowledge of Czech, as well as his later exposure to Yiddish literature and Hebrew texts, helps to distance him even further from his native tongue, eventually leading him to discover a subtly unsettling way of using German. Although Kafka observes the stylistic proprieties of standard German, he does so with a detached fastidiousness and an ascetic impoverishment of materials that render the language uncannily foreign while remaining technically correct. Deleuze and Guattari provide no specific examples of Kafka's stylistic innovations, citing instead the experimental practices of such writers as e e cummings, Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Samuel Beckett as instances of a minor deterritorialization of language. Yet their point is clear: what e e cummings, Celine and Beckett do overtly, Kafka does in a covert fashion: he makes language strange.
