HLVB0071CU Comparative LItterature: The Literary Work 1: A Monument in Ruins: Musil’s The Man Without Qualities

Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is a modernist classic, one of the defining novels of the 20^th century. As a literary testimony to times of upheaval, a radical change of the world as one knew it, Musil’s incomplete magnum opus takes on new significance in our present moment. We follow the protagonist Ulrich, the “man without qualities”, on his “vacation from life”, exploring a “sense of possibility” in a reality veering towards collapse: the days of Kakania (i.e. the Austro-Hungarian Empire) are numbered, World War I is on the horizon. Against this background, Musil explores the emergence of new notions of identity and consciousness in new literary forms and modes of representation. His planned great novel, which Maurice Blanchot called “a monument admirably in ruins,” remained unfinished. While mainly focusing on the first, published part of The Man without Qualities, we will also consider the text’s genetic history and ask what it means to deal with an unfinished (or unfinishable) work. Working our way chapter-by-chapter through Volume I, we will address questions of politics (e.g. impending war and the “parallel campaign”), race (e.g. the representation of Jewish and Black characters, discursive racism), gender and desire (e.g. the representation of masculinity; Ulrich’s erotic relation to his sister), language and thought (The Man Without Qualities as poetological text or novel of ideas), intermediality (the negotiation of media and other artforms like the newspaper, photography, music, etc.), literary techniques (e.g. the narrator’s irony), literary genre (e.g. Musil’s essayism) and translation (of the German original into English and Danish). By reading Musil’s text closely, analytical methods and concepts introduced in the course LiteraryTheory and Analysis will be put into practice (we will analyze narrative technique, style, voice, prose rhythm, and character-building) and put to the test (e.g. how does Musil’s concept of Gleichnis relate to literary tropes?). You are not required to be able to read German; the basic text used is Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike’s English translation.