Lawyers’ Metamorphosis: A Tragedy?

I suggested last time that the greatest difficulty of this form of explication du texte is its literalism. I still think that's true here. Are you sure that either Kafka or Joseph is wedded to a simple dualism? That there's just a little cockroach in everyone, as there's a little prisoner in every lawyer? I wonder if we should ask what it is about prisoners that makes them like lawyers, as much as we wonder why lawyers might be prisoners. I wonder, as I said before, if Ovid and Marlow and Goethe as well as Kafka and Joseph really consider metamorphosis simply the enactment of a correspondence.

The stakes here seem to be that this art is also normative: what lawyers are in Robinson's dissection of what they are is what they either should or shouldn't be. But this isn't just a text whose explication exists, as the work itself therefore also does, in an abstract world. It's a thing we are reading in this class, without our own context and our own purposes, and when we explain it we are explaining it to ourselves. So the route to improvement in my view is to use the poem to increase our understanding of what we are trying to learn about being lawyers ourselves.