Elvira Vigna, Kafka's reader: Kafkianas and the appropriation as a method of writing in the contemporary Brazilian production

Abstract

. In Kafkianas, a book published in 2018, the contemporary Brazilian author Elvira Vigna (1947-2017) presents her reinterpretations of 20 short stories by Franz Kafka. In addition to the rewriting of the texts, the reader has access to drawings made also by the author, at the opening of each of the stories. In this article, I analyze Elvira Vigna's two endeavours around Kafka's tales: (1) the writing of her reading and (2) the drawing from pre-existing texts, and from notions such as authorship, appropriation and rewriting. To this end, I turn to authors who think authorship and its consequences in a language such as Barthes (2004), Foucault (2002) and Eco (1994), in addition to contemporary Brazilian criticism dedicated to the theme and focus on specific aspects of current production, starting from the works of Villa-Forte (2019) and Klinger (2012). Kafkianas puts us in front of some usual manoeuvres of contemporary authorship, such as the appropriation of other people's texts and the creation of a signature of their own from this gesture. The analysis of texts and images also aims to reflect how contemporary production carries out its work, requiring from the reception new reading protocols, attentive to the joining of traditional ways of reading and new arrangements provided by technologies.