Franz Kafka is one of the founders of modern literature. His claim to greatness includes his service in completely collapsing the aesthetic distance that had traditionally separated the writer from the reader. In what is probably his most famous work of fiction, Die Verwandlung (1915; translated as "Metamorphosis," 1936-1938), the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, is presented to the reader as a man who has become an insect; Gregor's condition is never suggested to be an illusion or dream (although many critics have commented on its dreamlike qualities). In his shock at the result of Kafka's unmediated aesthetic distance, the reader is led to forgo his usual reflective and explicative function. Kafka has his characters perform that explicative function--hectically, repeatedly, self-contradictorily, and with a new kind of irony that has come to characterize modern literature. Finally, in an age that celebrates the mass, Kafka redirects the focus to the individual. His...