Genese Grill - Böcker

The first study to utilize the Klagenfurt Edition of Musil's Nachlass offers a close reading of textual variations, emphasizing Musil's commitment to the artist's role in re-creating the world.Robert Musil, known to be a scientific and philosophical thinker, was committed to aesthetics as a process of experimental creation of an ever-shifting reality. Musil wanted, above all, to be a creative writer, and obsessively engaged in almost endless deferral via variations and metaphoric possibilities in his novel project, The Man without Qualities. This lifelong process of writing is embodied in the unfinished novel by a recurring metaphor of self-generating de-centered circle worlds. The present study analyzes this structure with reference to Musil's concepts of the utopia of the Other Condition, Living and Dead Words, Specific and Non-Specific Emotions, Word Magic, andthe Still Life. In contrast to most recent studies of Musil, it concludes that the extratemporal metaphoric experience of the Other Condition does not fail, but rather constitutes the formal and ethical core of Musil's novel. Thefirst study to utilize the newly published Klagenfurt Edition of Musil's literary remains (a searchable annotated text), The World as Metaphor offers a close reading of variations and text genesis, shedding light not onlyon Musil's novel, but also on larger questions about the modernist artist's role and responsibility in consciously re-creating the world.Genese Grill holds a PhD in Germanic Literatures and Languages from the GraduateSchool and University Center of the City University of New York.

The first study to utilize the Klagenfurt Edition of Musil's Nachlass offers a close reading of textual variations, emphasizing Musil's commitment to the artist's role in re-creating the world.Robert Musil, known to be a scientific and philosophical thinker, was committed to aesthetics as a process of experimental creation of an ever-shifting reality. Musil wanted, above all, to be a creative writer, and he obsessively engaged in almost endless deferral via variations and metaphoric possibilities in his novel project, The Man without Qualities. This lifelong process of writing is embodied in the unfinished novel by a recurring metaphor of self-generating de-centered circle worlds. The present study analyzes this structure with reference to Musil's concepts of the utopia of the Other Condition, Living and Dead Words, Specific and Non-Specific Emotions, Word Magic, and the Still Life. In contrast to most recent studies of Musil, it concludes that the extratemporal metaphoric experience of the Other Condition does not fail, but rather constitutes the formal and ethical core of Musil's novel. The first study to utilize the Klagenfurter Ausgabe (Klagenfurt edition) of Musil's literary remains (a searchable annotated text), The World as Metaphor offers a close reading of variations and text genesis, shedding light not only on Musil's novel, but also on larger questions about the modernist artist's role and responsibility in consciously re-creating the world.

This volume explores the importance of scholarly and literary communities, the challenges of translation and difference, and the search for the ineffable in art. It is a collection of interviews, translations, scholarly essays, and tributes in honor of Burton Pike (1930–2022), a renowned translator of Robert Musil, Rilke, Goethe, Gerhard Meier, and others, as well as a scholar of literary Modernism and the image of the city. He was also an extraordinary teacher, mentor, and inspiration to a generation. The pieces are mostly written by former students, colleagues, and admiring friends, but the book also includes two interviews with Pike, along with Pike’s own previously unpublished lecture on Thomas Mann’s last novel, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man.