Power And Powerlessness in Kafka’s A Hunger Artist: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This study examines the discourse of powerlessness in Franz Kafka’s short story ‘The Hunger Artist’ by employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) which explores how Kafka’s narrative constructs the artist’s losing influence, and relevance in a shifting sociocultural context by following Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of CDA and Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge, This study shows how the way we talk about things takes away the power of the proponent. This research highlights how public language, institutional remarks, and silence function as tools of marginalization which ultimately leading to the artist’s symbolic disappearance. It also contributes to the understanding that how the exchange of bad words not only reflects but also perpetuates the social isolation and psychological trauma of powerless figures in modernist literature.

Keywords:   Power, Powerlessness, A Hunger Artist, Kafka, Critical Discourse Analysis