Soon after his birth, the family moved to Chomutov in Bohemia, and in 1891 Musil's father was appointed to the chair of Mechanical Engineering at the German Technical University in Brno and, later, he was raised to hereditary nobility in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The orientalist Alois Musil ("The Czech Lawrence") was his second cousin. Musil was born in Klagenfurt, Carinthia, the son of engineer Alfred Edler Musil (1846, Timișoara – 1924) and his wife Hermine Bergauer (1853, Linz – 1924). His unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities (German: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), is generally considered to be one of the most important and influential modernist novels.
Thomas Sebastian is Associate Professor of German at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.Robert Musil ( German: 6 November 1880 – 15 April 1942) was an Austrian philosophical writer. Thomas Sebastian explores Musil's background in experimental psychology, which he studied under the pioneering psychologist Carl Stumpf, and how it and other strains of scientific thought, including that of Ernst Mach, on whose philosophical ideas Musil wrote his doctoral thesis, are reflected in his great novel. Revealing the novel's many philosophical underpinnings, the study analyzes the intersection of theoretical reflection and aesthetic imagination essential to Musil's programmatic move beyond realism.
As the utopian projection of a world in which the conditional mood is preferred to the indicative, Robert Musil's ambitious novel The Man Without Qualities is widely recognized as a great example of aesthetic modernism anda profound reflection on the "postmodern condition." Based on the new and more inclusive English translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike, this study provides the English-speaking reader with a well-researched commentary thatsituates Musil's novel in the cultural, literary, and scientific context of the early 20th century. A fresh view of the interplay of science and literature affecting Musil's great novel.
0 kommentar(er)
