I found a really cool audio clip of David Foster Wallace speaking about Kafka. I think it answers this question I asked in the first class in some weird, round-about way. I would also like to take a second to apologize for that question, which I felt like a complete dofus about immediately after asking it. Anyways, I also feel like DFW sums up why, as a North American undergrad student interested in studying/analyzing literature, I may have asked it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzEO0qFFzwI