GERST 6140 - [The Man Without Qualities and Theories of Narration]

(crosslisted)
(also COML 6141)

4 credits.

Next offered 2014-2015.

P. McBride.

This seminar will focus on Robert Musil’s torso The Man without Qualities. Our discussion of the novel will unfold along two tracks. On the one hand, we will draw on Musil’s essays and notebooks to situate his highly reflexive project within contemporary attempts at overcoming a realist narrative paradigm in the experiments of Symbolism, Expressionism, and, after World War I, the documentary writing of the New Objectivity. Musil’s endeavor will thus provide a prism for interrogating key preoccupations that are conventionally grouped under the label of modernism: estrangement as a privileged mode of aesthetic experience; the relation of language, thought, and reason; the death of the subject; the incompletability of narrative; the entwinement of history and storytelling; irony, essayism, and mysticism as circumscribing the ethical and political dimensions of writing. A second thread we will pursue concerns the ways in which Musil’s novel resonates with a variety of influential attempts at conceptualizing narrative in our time. Possible readings will include texts by Adorno, Auerbach, Bakhtin, Bal, Benjamin, Blanchot, Bohrer, de Man, Eco, Genette, Kristeva, Lyotard, Moretti, Todorov.