Critical Response to Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities
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20th Century
A01=Tim Mehigan
Aesthetics
Austrian Writer
Author_Tim Mehigan
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Ethics
Identity
Literature
Robert Musil
The Man without Qualities
Product details
- ISBN 9781571131171
- Weight: 436g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 21 Jul 2003
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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A study of the most significant international scholarship on Musil's famous novel.
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, whichhas 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.
