This course examines the oeuvre of Franz Kafka, as it developed in a remarkably short period: from his 1911-12 novel, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), and his 1912 breakthrough novella, The Metamorphosis; to his middle years, during World War I, when he wrote The Trial and the burst of stories collected in A Country Doctor; to The Castle and the final stories he penned before dying, at age forty, in 1924. We will attempt to understand why Kafka, who published so little and never completed any of his novels, left a powerful legacy on world literature and culture.