Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Problem of the Two Cultures
This comprehensive study explores Robert Musil's remarkable body of work, highlighting how it reflects the conflict between the "two cultures." The author, a prominent scholar in Musil studies, delves into the complexities of Musil's writing and the intellectual challenges he faced, providing fresh insights into his contributions to literature and thought.
New essays providing critical views of Coetzee's major works for the scholar and the general reader.
Dass der Repräsentation des Raumes ein Raum der Repräsentation immer schon vorausgeschickt ist, gilt als wesentliche Erkenntnis der über ihre eigenen Entstehungszustände reflektierenden Literatur der Moderne. Ausgehend von der Annahme eines Spatial Turn in der jüngsten Literaturwissenschaft werden in diesem Band die neuesten Forschungen zu Raumfragen in der Moderne vorgestellt. Dabei werden die Grundbedingungen einer Literatur ausgeleuchtet, in der die Raumerfahrung als bewusstseinsgenerierendes sowie gesellschaftsetablierendes Moment von Sein par excellence gewertet werden kann.
Kleist viewed anew as a major contributor to the tradition of post-Kantian thought.
How space – mental, emotional, visual – is implicated in our constructions of reality and our art is the focus of this set of innovative essays. For the first time art theorists and historians, visual artists, literary critics and philosophers have come together to assay the problem of space both within conventional discipline boundaries and across them. What emerges is a stimulating discussion of the problem of embodied space and situated consciousness that will be of interest to the general reader as well as specialists working in the fields of art history and art practice, literature, philosophy and education.
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.Table of ContentsIntroductionEarly Philology and Existentialst ReadingsFrom Social Criticism to Cultural CritiquePsychological and Psychoanalytical ReadingsAesthetic ReadingsThe Order of Ethical ReadingsThe Information of CommunicationEditions of Der Mann ohne EigenschaftenMusil BibliographiesWorks ConsultedIndex
Kleist's narratives convey a strong sense of structure, while describing the ubiquity of disorder in the imaginary world. A narrative paradigm, the contract, is advanced to analyse this interplay of pattern and disorder. The contract, it is argued, characterizes the relationships between the figures of the stories and stands for the broader concept of the written word as a guarantor of meaning - that is, as the medium between poet and reader. This study, then, must reflect on the possibility of legitimate communication - and of interpretation - in narrative.