Robert Musil and the crisis of European culture, 1880–1942. Subject without nation: Robert Musil and the history of modern identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. The Austrian mind: An intellectual and social history, 1848–1938. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. The garden and the workshop: Essays on the cultural history of Vienna and Budapest.
The world as metaphor in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities: Possibility as reality. Experience without qualities: Boredom and modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Ĭrankshaw, Edward. Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his time: The European imagination, 1860–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.īroch, Hermann. Finally, the piece suggests some ways in which even this abstraction, along with other features of the novel, can be seen as arising from the concrete situation of the Habsburg Empire and its capital. It then proceeds to explore the ways in which the intellectual abstraction of the novel contributes to a similarly abstract vision of Vienna as a city without qualities. This entry first discusses The Man Without Qualities through the idea of essayism – a coinage of Musil’s that is fundamental both to the novel’s form and content. In using this moment as a launch pad for his philosophical explorations of modernity, Musil, somewhat ironically, contributes to situating the Austrian capital towards the center not just of the European map but of the European twentieth century.
In other respects, however, the novel arises from a historical and cultural moment specific to Vienna. Consistently with this, the city figures in some respects as an idea or a state of mind more than a geographically specific place. Like many modernist writers, Musil prioritizes the inner world over the outer, and most of the novel is dedicated to searching intellectual and psychological analyses of its characters and their world. Opening in the summer of 1913, it depicts the Habsburg Empire and the long, liberal nineteenth century on the eve of their collapse. Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is an unfinished novel written in Vienna between the wars.
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