Christian Rogowski

This study analyzes Musil's contribution to the praxis and poetics of drama by placing his dramatic efforts in the context of what Peter Szondi has described as the "crisis of modern drama". Musil's plays address such issues as the problem of dramatic mimesis and the question of whether there can be a modern form of tragic drama appropriate to the experience of modernity. Close readings of his texts explore how any drama prefigures the interaction between text/reader and performance/audience by means of self-referential devices. Such an investigation not only reveals a special facet of Musil's oeuvre, but also offers a contribution towards a theory of reading drama, a reading of the printed play as a prefiguration of an enacted event.

Robert Musil and the Crisis of Modern Drama

Implied Dramaturgy

A guide through the many aspects of Wenders's groundbreaking film, employing archival research to bring out new insights into its making and its meanings.

Wings of Desire

New essays re-evaluating Weimar cinema from a broadened, up-to-date perspective.

Rediscovering Germany's Filmic Legacy

The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema

Austrian writer Robert Musil (1880-1942) ranks with Proust, Joyce, Kafka and Thomas Mann as a master of the modern prose narrative; his works encompass a wide range of theoretical and aesthetic impulses, ranging from Nietzsche to Mach, from Gestalt theory to Freudian psychoanalysis. This volume traces the scholarly reception of Musil's works, marked by discontinuities and abrupt shifts of perception. At the beginning of his career, Musil was stereotyped as an author primarily interested in morally questionable 'psychological' issues, before being plunged into near oblivion by his exile, forced by National Socialism. After the Second World War he was 'rediscovered', but the development of Musil studies was severely hampered by the inability to determine an authoritative edition of his unfinished masterpiece, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities), 1930-43. Professor Rogowski shows how successive generations of scholars have appropriated Musil for their own ends, constructing a bewildering and often contradictory array of images of the author according to their own ideological and methodological biases, and how this multitude of different perspectives corresponds with changes in German studies and historical developments over the past four decades. In so doing, he sheds new light on Musil's paradoxical status as, in the words of Frank Kermode, 'the least read of the great twentieth-century novelists'. CHRISTIAN ROGOWSKI is assistant professor of German at Amherst College.

Robert Musil and His Critics

Distinguished Outsider

Alison Guenther-Pal

Antje Ascheid

John E. Davidson

Stefan Soldovieri

Christine Haase

Lutz Koepnick

Janet McCabe

Brad Prager

Nancy P. Nenno

Robert C. Reimer

Richard W. McCormick

Tim Bergfelder

Elizabeth Mittman

Alasdair King

Hester Baer

Light Motives undertakes a long overdue critical reassessment of German popular cinema, challenging the traditional view of German film history and offering new ways to think about popular cinema in general.

German Popular Film in Perspective

Light Motives

Christian Rogowski

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