Skipping Between Text and Performance: Some Questions of "Realism"

Following Gérard Genette’s explorations of “transtextuality”, the article addresses the afterlife of Franz Kafka’s Report to an Academy in examples offered by J.M. Coetzee and Oliver Frljic. These construct a palimpsest for considering the dynamic relation between “text and performance”, as broaching questions of ethics in narrative practices that cannot, perhaps, be limited to those of narratology. The article attempts to maintain a sense of being itself an example of its own understanding, echoing also the sense of the “propositional” to be found in A.N. Whitehead.