“Kafkaesque” describes as the Oxford Dictionaries would put it, “oppressive or nightmarish qualities,” or as Merriam-Webster suggests, “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.“
What’s Kafkaesque is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behaviour, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world. You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What you do is a struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course, you don’t stand a chance. That’s Kafkaesque.
According to Wikipedia, the term Kafkaesque is “an eponym used to describe concepts, situations, and ideas which are reminiscent of the literary work of the Austro-Hungarian writer Franz Kafka,” and in 2010, people pretty much think they can apply the term to just about anything.
Is the over-usage a symptom of our strange times, or are people just too lazy to search for a better term? Maybe these ten examples will help figure that out.
1. Estate tax. Nothing makes me think of The Trial quite like estate tax.
2. Zombies. They can totally be Kafkaesque: “” What I wake up into is one of the worst days any human should wake up to. It’s a Kafka-esque nightmare. I wanted to make it as truthful and as real to me as possible.”
3. Television shows that everybody seems to be talking about, like Breaking Bad.
4. Politics in India.
5. No-fly and watch lists, are, yup, you guessed it.
6. “Dilbert lives in a Kafkaesque world of bureaucracy.”
7. Would you date a person whose writing style on a dating website registers as Kafkaesque?
8. Wondering if Asian women are attracted to Western men.
9. All of these movies.
10. Nobel laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa, describing the commute from New Jersey to New York during rush hour: “It’s very nice. But not if you take the train at 5 or 6 o’clock. It can be a Kafkaesque commute.”
Thanks
https://lithub.com/a-kafkaesque-list-of-things-described-as-kafkaesque/
http://jewcy.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/top-ten-favorite-examples-of-kafkaesque
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