The Critical Response to Musil's The Man Without Qualities

The Critical Response to Musil's The Man Without Qualities PDF Author: Timothy J. Mehigan
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571131171
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Table of contents

The Critical Response to Musil's The Man Without Qualities

The Critical Response to Musil's The Man Without Qualities PDF Author: Timothy J. Mehigan
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571131171
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Table of contents

Agathe

Agathe PDF Author: Robert Musil
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681373831
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
From the author of 'A Man without Qualities,' a novel about spirituality in the modern world. Agathe is the sister of Ulrich, the restless and elusive “man without qualities” at the center of Robert Musil’s great, unfinished novel of the same name. For years Agathe and Ulrich have ignored each other, but when brother and sister find themselves reunited over the bier of their dead father, they are electrified. Each is the other’s spitting image, and Agathe, who has just separated from her husband, is even more defiant and inquiring than Ulrich. Beginning with a series of increasingly intense “holy conversations,” the two gradually enlarge the boundaries of sexuality, sensuality, identity, and understanding in pursuit of a new, true form of being that they are seeking to discover. Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is perhaps the most profoundly exploratory and unsettling masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction. Agathe, or, The Forgotten Sister reveals with new clarity a particular dimension of this multidimensional book—the dimension that meant the most to Musil himself and that inspired some of his most searching writing. The outstanding translator Joel Agee captures the acuity, audacity, and unsettling poetry of a book that is meant to be nothing short of life-changing.

The Critical Response to Robert Musil's the Man Without Qualities

The Critical Response to Robert Musil's the Man Without Qualities PDF Author: Timothy J. Mehigan
Publisher: Camden House (NY)
ISBN: 9781571136152
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Thomas Mann's last major novel, 'Doktor Faustus', revolves around the transformation of traditional German culture into Hitler's fascist Germany, a process that intrigues and confounds thinking people still today. Mann has always been considered an exempl

The Enthusiasts

The Enthusiasts PDF Author: Robert Musil
Publisher: AJ Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
A philisophical erotic comedy of ideas in which the old world is threatened by new ideas of sexual freedom and scientific scepticism.

Precision and Soul

Precision and Soul PDF Author: Robert Musil
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226554090
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
"We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little precision in matters of the soul."—Robert Musil Best known as author of the novel The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil wrote these essays in Vienna and Berlin between 1911 and 1937. Offering a perspective on modern society and intellectual life, they are concerned with the crisis of modern culture as it manifests itself in science and mathematics, capitalism and nationalism, the changing roles of women and writers, and more. Writing to find his way in a world where moral systems everywhere were seemingly in decay, Musil strives to reconcile the ongoing conflict between functional relativism and the passionate search for ethical values. Robert Musil was born in 1880 and died in 1942. His first novel, Young Törless, is available in English. A new two-volume translation by Burton Pike and Sophie Wilkins of The Man without Qualities is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf. "Now we have these thirty-one invaluable and entertaining pieces, from an article on 'The Obscene and Pathological in Art' to the equally provocative talk 'On Stupidity,' which, with a new translation of The Man without Qualities forthcoming . . . amount to a literary event for the reader of English comparable to Constance Garnett's massive translation of Chekhov's stories."—Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune "Musil is one of the few great moderns, one of the handful who ventured to confront the issues that shape and define our time. . . . He has a range and a striking capacity every bit as great as that of Mann, Joyce, or Beckett."—Boston Review "These essays are crucial in understanding a writer and critic whose lifelong task was an attempt to resolve the dichotomy between the precision of scientific form and the soul—the matter of life and art."—Choice

The Void of Ethics

The Void of Ethics PDF Author: Patrizia McBride
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810121093
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
In a pluralistic society without absolute standards of judgment, how can an individual live a moral life? This is the question Robert Musil (1880-1942), an Austrian-born engineer and mathematician turned writer, asked in essays, plays, and fiction that grapple with the moral ambivalence of modern life. Though unfinished, his monumental novel of Vienna in the febrile days before World War I, The Man without Qualities, is identified by German scholars as the most important literary work of the twentieth century. In a fresh examination of his essays, notebooks, and fiction, Patrizia McBride reconstructs Musil's understanding of ethics as a realm of experience that eludes language and thought. After situating Musil's work within its contemporary cultural-philosophical horizon, as well as the historical background of rising National Socialism, McBride shows how the writer's notion of ethics as a void can be understood as a coherent and innovative response to the crises haunting Europe after World War I. She explores how Musil rejected the outdated, rationalistic morality of humanism, while simultaneously critiquing the irrationalism of contemporary art movements, including symbolism, impressionism, and expressionism. Her work reveals Musil's remarkable relevance today-particularly those aspects of his thought that made him unfashionable in his own time: a commitment to fighting ethical fundamentalism and a literary imagination that validates the pluralistic character of modern life.

A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil

A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil PDF Author: Philip Payne
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 1571131108
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
A fresh and extensive look at the works of the great Austrian novelist in the context of the German and Austrian culture of his time.

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read PDF Author: Pierre Bayard
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1596917148
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
In this delightfully witty, provocative book, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it. (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do.) Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, he describes the varieties of "non-reading"-from books that you've never heard of to books that you've read and forgotten-and offers advice on how to turn a sticky social situation into an occasion for creative brilliance. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read-which became a favorite of readers everywhere in the hardcover edition-is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them.

Subject Without Nation

Subject Without Nation PDF Author: Stefan Jonsson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822325703
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Jonsson analyzes how Musil explains the foundation of modern theories of subjectivity.

Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

Posthumous Papers of a Living Author PDF Author: Robert Musil
Publisher: Archipelago
ISBN: 1935744488
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
This collection of exploratory pieces, short stories, and reflections was originally published in Zurich in 1936. It was the last volume Robert Musil published before his sudden death in 1942. Musil had begun to fathom the impossibility of com- pleting his monumental masterpiece The Man Without Qualities and this volume reveals a radically different aspect of his work. Musil observes a fly’s tragic struggle with flypaper, the laughter of a horse; he peers through microscopes and telescopes, dissecting both large and small. Musil’s quest for the essential is a voyage into the minute.