Customer Reviews (1)

A Bit of Everything
Readers who seek a comprehensive collection of Robert Musil's work - exclusive of his opus, "The Man Without Qualities" - will be well-served by this edition.It contains most of his short stories, someof his non-fiction writings, and most importantly, his first novel,"Young Torless" - an early look at Musil's craft which alsointroduces us to the themes contained in his later works.The bare plot of"Torless" readsdeceptively like one of those bad teen dramas onthe WB network: it is the tale of secrets and betrayals among schoolboys,here in the turn-of-the-century Austro-Hungarian Empire.But in Musil'shands, as always, it is a work of deep philosophical ideas; he uses therelationships among the boys to explore the nature of power - how it isgained, how it corrupts, how it destroys.We are required to confront theproblem of truth and the fallacy of objective morality.Thedisillusionment that Young Torless feels when his teacher is unable toexplain the theory of imaginary numbers - telling his pupil that he mustmerely "accept" that they exist - is the same skepticism whichMusil and the other modernist writers felt for all ideas, whether science,history, politics or faith.It was through literature that Musil believedthat he might bring order to the world, that he might re-create ideas.Forany reader who wishes an introduction to the variety of Robert Musil'swork, this is a good start. ... Read more

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Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities is perhaps the most important novel in German written in the twentieth century - certainly it is among the most brilliant, puzzling and profound. This, the first comprehensive study of the work to appear in English, guides the reader towards Musil's central concerns. It examines how Musil laboured through draft after draft to produce material that would pass his own strict literary 'quality control' and traces major themes through different layers of narrative with the aid of close textual analysis. It details how Musil subjects leading figures of fin-de-siecle Vienna to intense ironic scrutiny and how, by drawing on his extensive knowledge of philosophy, psychology, politics, sociology and science, he works into his novel essayistic statements which record the state of contemporary European civilisation. Through a disturbing and deeply serious liaison with his sister, Musil's hero Ulrich, is shown to struggle through to the brink of self-discovery and enlightenment. ... Read more

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The Austrian writer Robert Musil ranks among the foremost novelists of the 20th century. Despite a series of lesser but well-regarded shorter works, his literary reputation rests almost entirely on his novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities), a life-work in the truest sense, which became the focus of all his energies and thinking from 1924 until his death in 1942. This study analyzes the principal trends in scholarship on the novel from the 1960s to the present. It contrasts earlier criticism, which foregrounded the eponymous central character's search for identity against the background of subject theory or mysticism, with more recent criticism, which has focused on aesthetic and ethical approaches to the novel within the broader context of theories of value. A focal chapter in the study centers on the persistent difficulty critics have encountered with the idea of "Eigenschaftslosigkeit," the state of being without qualities named in the novel's title.Tim Mehigan is Associate Professor of German and Head of the Department of Germanic Studies and Russian at the University of Melbourne. ... Read more

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This book positions Robert Musil's theory and writings within recent critical accounts of modernism and brings him into dialogue with continental philosophy. Musil's novel "The Man Without Qualities" is widely recognized as a monument of modernist literature alongside "Remembrance of Things Past" and "Ulysses". But while Musil is a major scholarly industry in the German-speaking world, critical attention from English-speaking scholars remains disproportionately small. Moreover, there has been little engagement with Musil's contribution to cultural theory from those working outside literary studies. Freed brings Musil into dialogue with critics of the modern such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Lyotard and argues that Musil's theory and literary performance of essayism constitutes a strategy of nonmodernity: that is, an engagement with the problems of modernity that does not re-inscribe the distinctions on which modernism grounded itself. This book not only offers an understanding of Musil's essayism made possible by Latour's account of modernity: it also articulates what the discursive and cultural project of nonmodernity might look like.The book thereby introduces Musil scholars and those working in the problematics of postmodernism to one another's interests. ... Read more