Kafkaesque
adjUK /ˌkæfkəˈʔɛsk/ · US /ˌkɑfkəˈʔɛsk/
Etymology From Kafka + -esque, after writer Franz Kafka. Piecewise doublet of Kafkaish.
1
Marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity.
- Kafkaesque bureaucracies
- In the end, Jesus is not only a Kafkaesque, lonely, holy man, abandoned in his death and despised by his own people, but his teaching is not even considered to be like that of the Jewish Sages.2001, David Flusser, Jesus (3d ed; Jerusalem: Magnes), →ISBN, page 250:
2 more examples
- The world is increasingly becoming a Single Central Europe with its Kafkaesque anonymity, Musilesque human-traits-free individuality, or the divided individual without individuality and indivisibility, Orwellesque Newspeak and total control, if not manufacturing, of history.2011, L. Donskis, Modernity in Crisis: A Dialogue on the Culture of Belonging:
- Imagine a city like Los Angeles disappearing from the map completely. That's exactly what happened to Chaohu, a city in eastern China's Anhui province with a similar population — about 4 million. The people have remained, but the city has vanished in an administrative sleight of hand. That was the Kafkaesque reality for Chaohu's inhabitants, who went to bed one night and woke up the morning of Aug. 22 to find out that their city no longer existed. For many, their first inkling that something had changed was from the local news.2011 September 21, Louisa Lim, “The Curious Case Of The Vanishing Chinese City”, in NPR, archived from the original on 21 Sep 2011, Asia:
2
Marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of looming danger.
3
In the manner of something written by Franz Kafka.
- Derived terms
- Kafkaesquely, Kafkaesqueness, unKafkaesque
- Related terms
- Kafkaian, Kafkatrap, Kafkian, Dickensian, Orwellian, Lynchian