Excerpt from Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities Volume One Translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser Picador (1979) 28 A chapter that can be skipped by anyone who has no very high opinion of thinking as an occupation MEANWHILE Ulrich was at home, sitting at his desk, working. He had got out the analysis that…
Burton Pike, editor and translator of Robert Musil’s titanic though unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities, discusses the philosophical and aesthetic ideas circulating in pre-war Viennese society as depicted in the novel. Podcast here. The discussion bears a striking resemblance to Percy’s concerns — no surprise there. Also check out David Auerbach’s commentary on Pike’s…
Here is the long awaited lineup for Bence Nanay’s issue for The Monist (97:1 Jan 2014). Bence Nanay The Dethroning of Ideocracy: Robert Musil as a Philosopher Robert Musil was not a professional philosopher. He was a novelist— and according to the widely accepted canon, his contribution to the twentieth-century novel is only matched by very…
This excerpt from the very excellent Philip Payne in Philip Payne, Graham Bartram and Galin Tihanov (eds), A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007, pp. 39-40). Musil admired Kafka’s work. He made a point of meeting Kafka when the Czech author visited Berlin. As we have seen, Musil wanted to publish…
Here is the intro to a review essay: Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces. Cory MacLauchlin. Boston and New York: Da Capo Press, 2012, 319 pages, $26.00 hardcover. The book is not autobiography; neither is it altogether invention. While the…
The LAF is putting on two lectures that would have great appeal to me: One of my favourite philosophers, Colin McGinn, on Hand, Mind and Language: In what ways might the human hand have contributed to the evolution of the human mind and human language? To what extent do we have a “manual mind”? Could spoken…
Here is a review by David Winters on Mark Reed’s recently published Robert Musil and the NonModern. There’s something about The Man Without Qualities that seems to resist conclusive criticism. Something not so much unfinished as uniquely continuous; infinite. The reason the novel is unlike anything else you’ll ever read is because it goes on reading itself…
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