A Kafkaesque "non-conversation": Gespräch mit dem Betrunkenen|Una “non-conversazione” kafkiana: Gespräch mit dem Betrunkenen

Kafka’s 'Gespräch mit dem Betrunkenen' is one of his early prose texts that incisively engages with the fin-de-siècle crisis of language. In this work, the crisis takes shape as a Gesprächskrise – a conversational breakdown – since the failure of communication occurs entirely within the domain of oral interaction. The articles examines the collapse of conversational structure in the text, both from a linguistic and a dialogic-literary perspective, in order to demonstrate how Kafka enacts a new textual genre: the ‘non-conversation’. This is shown, on one hand, by pushing to the extreme the form of “pure conversation” (Bauer 1977) and, on the other, through the total violation of the cooperative conversational principle (Grice 1975).