Robert Musil's Intellectual Affinities

Robert Musil’s Intellectual Affinities

Brett Martz and Todd Cesaratto (eds.)

PETER LANG

Bern • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Oxford • Warszawa • Wien

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über ‹http://dnb.d-nb.de›.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953516

ISSN 1424-7658

ISBN 978-3-0343-2115-0 pb.

ISBN 978-3-0343-3094-7 eISBN

ISBN 978-3-0343-3095-4 EPUB

ISBN 978-3-0343-3096-1 MOBI

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About the author

Brett Martz is an Assistant Professor of German and Program Coordinator of Modern Languages at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia. He serves as the current president of the Virginia Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of German. He has published or presented on reader response as well as the relationships between literature and science.

Todd Cesaratto moved to Vienna, after two Visiting Assistant Professorships in the U.S., to work as Senior Communications Manager for Mondi, a global packaging and paper company. Walking the streets Musil once did, he continues writing about the positive outcomes that a sense of possibility, humor, and heroism make possible. On Musil he has published “Von Ketten’s Climb: Making a Mark in Robert Musil’s ‘Die Portugiesin’” and “Politik durch Gefühlseinsatz: General Stumm von Bordwehr in ‘Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften’”, in Terror and Erlösung. Robert Musil und der Gewaltdiskurs der Zwischenkriegszeit.

About the book

comIn German-speaking modernity, Robert Musil may lay the last valid claim to the title of Universalgenie. Trained as a soldier, engineer, philosopher, and psychologist, he did not shy from investigations beyond his accredited purview. His work repurposes the conceptual inventories of literature, philosophy, science, law, medicine, politics, education, etc. to revisit classical questions of beauty, truth, and morality within an ultra-complex modern context. The answers he finds are not conclusive but suggestive and always invite re-examination. Musil studies, at its best, embraces his practice of multivalent inquiry, and the present essay collection endeavors to follow suit. Drawing from Musil’s fiction, essays, letters, diaries, and public addresses, the authors of this volume offer unexpected treatments of ideas that Musil examined and reveal previously overlooked links between those ideas and other authors, works, and movements. The contributions have a footing in fields such as psychology, sociology, and statistics; cover concepts like humor, identity, and love; and deal with literary epochs or theories ranging from Romanticism and Modernity to decadence and reader response.

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Table of contents

Editors’ Preface

Birthe Hoffmann

Eine menschliche Moderne? Robert Musils Versuch einer neuen Synthese auf dem Boden der Gestaltpsychologie

Sergej Rickenbacher

Von der Gefühlspsychologie zur Poetologie der „Stimmung“. Musils Weiterschreiben von Carl Stumpf

Agnieszka Hudzik

Musil wiederbegegnet: Verführung als Interpretationsinstrument in Vereinigungen

Friederike Schläfer

„…sie fühlten alle diesen Dritten um sich stehen“. Wie sich die Figur des Dritten zur Liebe verhält in Robert Musils Frühwerk

Florence Vatan

Statistics and the Novel: Robert Musil and Richard von Mises

Salvatore Pappalardo

Habsburg Loyalties as Intellectual Affinities: Non-National Allegiances in Robert Musil and Bernard Bolzano←5 | 6→

Brett Martz

Der Fall Homo: Musil’s Grigia and Nietzsche’s Der Fall Wagner

Todd Cesaratto

Humor, Musil + the Romantics

Authors ←6 | 7→

Editors’ Preface

Getting to know Robert Musil combines moments of joy with moments of strain. Being his friend is not easy work. He hints that he is aware of this situation, that he even approves of and perpetuates it by creating characters who cannot handle this type of friendship: Walter in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Aeins in Die Amsel, the fat friend from “Ein/ Der Mensch ohne Character.” Failed relationships belong to the markers he uses to paint around a vast undetermined space where affinity can take root and thrive on truthful, austere, yet ultimately generous exchanges. Through such mechanisms Musil chose and continues to choose his company carefully. He sought the unlikeliest conversation partners, and he clearly knew he would never sit in the same room with them: “Sometimes I wanted to write letters to a young man who lived eighty to one hundred years after me. Instead of that have them addressed to a young American alive now” (Tb 1 806). The contributors feel addressed by Musil and are indeed responding roughly eighty years later and/or from America. Our studies are situated on the field of affinity that Musil stakes out, and they are intended to enrich existing intellectual friendships and encourage new ones.

This volume emerges from a series of panels held at the thirty-ninth annual German Studies Association conference, which was held near Washington DC. It also still shares the same title as the panel series, Musil’s Intellectual Affinities. When we concocted the idea, we had hoped to hear from scholars who were working on previously unexplored connections between Musil and any intellectual predecessor, contemporary, or successor. The field of Musil studies has been receptive to such comparative approaches, be they on Kant, Husserl, or Luhmann. Our panel’s intent was to add new names and ideas to this ever expanding roster of intellectual peers or to revisit established connections in search of new insight. Our call for papers elicited a substantial response, which allowed us to curate three full panels spanning the entire conference weekend. It was encouraging to see that the←7 | 8→ strong general interest in our topic also came from a diverse international research community.