From defeat to resilience: The human cockroach in world literature after Kafka
From defeat to resilience: The human cockroach in world literature after Kafka

Summary/Abstract: Through a selection of literary texts featuring cockroaches in the wake of Franz Kafka’s GregorSamsa in Metamorphosis (1915): Clarice Lispector’s A paixão segundo G.H. (1964; The PassionAccording to G.H., 1988), Marc Estrin’s Insect Dreams: The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa (2002),Scholastique Mukasonga’s Inyenzi ou les Cafards (2006; Cockroaches, 2016), and Rawi Hage’sCockroach (2008), this article shows how these authors politicize the cockroach as bestia sacrabetween trauma and resilience. These literary works are exemplary in demonstrating howAnthropocene fiction resists and destabilizes biopolitically charged species metaphors with theirdehumanizing agency. How do these authors, in writing beyond Kafka’s doomed human cock-roach, liberate the species blattodae from its aura of dehumanization and draw on the resilienceof this ancient species in the face of adversity and as a model for human agency?

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