By Ann Kowal Smith and The Learning Network
Franz Kafka wrote such odd and affecting stories that he left behind his own adjective: Many use the word “Kafkaesque” to describe strange and nightmarish situations embedded in everyday life.
It’s easy to assume that these stories have nothing to do with the world we live in today. And yet, his themes and ideas are so prevalent that choosing a New York Times article to pair with his classic 1915 novella “The Metamorphosis” was hard — not for the lack of articles but for the challenge of narrowing it down to just one.
After much consideration, we chose Dhruv Khullar’s 2016 piece “How Social Isolation Is Killing Us” for the way it takes Kafka’s haunting themes of loneliness and disconnection and places them in the context of modern life. In this Text to Text lesson plan, we pair the two to explore what makes us human, how much our connections to others affect our sense of belonging — and where our loneliness and humanity collide.
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Read the full story at The New York Times.
