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Existentialists have seen Kafka's environment of guilt and despair as the ground upon which to construct an authentic existence. Some have seen his neurotic involvement with his father as the heart of his work; others have emphasized the social criticism, the inhumanity of the powerful and their agents, the violence and barbarity that lurk beneath normal routine. Some have found an imaginative anticipation of totalitarianism in the random and faceless bureaucratic terror of The Trial. The Surrealists delighted in the persistent intrusions of the absurd. There is evidence in both the works and the diaries for each of these interpretations, but Kafka's work as a whole transcends them all. One critic may have put it most accurately when he wrote of the works as “open parables” whose final meanings can never be rounded off. But Kafka's oeuvre is also limited. Each of his works bears the marks of a man suffering in spirit and body, searching desperately, but always inwardly, for meaning, security, self-worth, and a sense of purpose. Kafka himself looked upon his writing and the creative act it signified as a means of “redemption,” as a “form of prayer” through which he might be reconciled to the world or might transcend his negative experience of it. The lucidly described but inexplicable darkness of his works reveal Kafka's own frustrated personal struggles, but through his powerless characters and the strange incidents that befall them the author achieved a compelling symbolism that more broadly signifies the anxiety and alienation of the 20th-century world itself. --encyclopedia Britannica

Minds: The Minds of Existentialism: The Realm of Existentialism houses an eclectic aggregation of Philosophers, Poets, Psychologists, Playwrights and Theologians -- all major league players -- indepth biographies, books and reviews, quotations, and a state-of-the-art bookstore for a more in-depth exploration, One-on-One. to name a few: Karl Barth, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, William Blake, Martin Buber, Albert Camus, E. M. Cioran, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Martin Heidegger, William James, Karl Jaspers, Franz Kafka, Soren Kierkegaard, Abraham H. Maslow, Friedrich Nietzsche, Blaise Pascal, Jean Paul Sartre, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Henry David Thoreau, Paul Tillich, Theatre of the Absurd

Existential Basics: Basic Themes of Existentialism: The Bare Essentials for the Mind-on-Fire, a quick overview of some of the basic, ever-winding, rivers that run through Existentialism and the human experience; love, anxiety, stress, solitude, relationships, failure, sadness, death, loneliness, human frailty etc. A very meaty section in the Realm of Existentialism, and frequently up-dated! Topics such as: What is Existentialism? | Basic Themes of Existentialism | Existential-Speak | Existential Themed Books and Reviews | Existentialism and the Human Situation | Existentialism and the American Consciousness | Existentialism and Moral Individualism | Subjectivity and Existentialism | Existentialism, Choice and Commitment | Irrational Man : A Study in Existential Philosophy | Existentialism's Dread and Anxiety | Existentialism : Man and Human Relationships | Existentialism and the Significance of Being | World, Limits, Existence -- Existentialism | Problems of Existentialist Theology | Modern Existentialist and Phenomenological Studies | What is Phenomenology?

Existential-Speak: Existential-Speak: Words and phrases usually associated with the Philosophy of Existentialism. Alienation | Ambiguity | Angst or Anxiety | Awareness as Agony | Bad Faith | Being | Boredom | Christian Existentialism | Death | Demythologized | Ethics and Morality | Existence Precedes Essence | Existential | Existentialism | Faceless | Fight Club | for None and All | Futility | God is Dead! | Hell is Other People! | Individualism | Nausea | Nothingness -- Nonbeing | Phenomenology Theatre of the Absurd

Quotes: Quotes: Keeping the ball in the court of Existentialism and Existential thought, thousands of the most thought-provoking Quotations imaginable! Tastefully arranged and streamed from MindPleasures.com

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