Franz Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of
imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that
imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in
modernity. Rather, it allows Kafka to perform a critique of a modernity
that first posits a clear-cut opposition between confinement and
freedom, and then sets up freedom as an ideal which, conceived in such
absolute terms, is by definition unattainable.