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Title
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Ecstatic experience, crime, and conversion in Robert Musil's "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften".
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Identifier
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AAI3008832
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identifier
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3008832
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Creator
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Grill, Genese Elinor.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Burton Pike
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Date
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2001
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Germanic | Literature, Comparative | Literature, Modern | Literature, Medieval
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Abstract
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Robert Musil (1880--1941), as physicist, behavioral psychologist, engineer, mathematician, and novelist, possessed multiple vocabularies for defining the burgeoning complexities of twentieth-century thought. As one of the pioneers of experimental European Modernism, Musil was engaged in the serious game of reinvesting the deadened communal language of nineteenth-century positivism with the intensity of individual subjective experience, alternate visions of reality, and a constant and rigorous reevaluation of values. Without abandoning the precision he had learned in his scientific studies, Musil attempted to explore the murkier regions, to investigate the realms of the mystical, the aesthetic, the emotional with the sharpness of a "vivisector" and, conversely, to revisit the realms of precision with the energy of what he called "living" language. To that end he developed something he called "the other condition," based on traditional mysticisms, on anthropological studies of primitive ritual and consciousness, on contemporary findings on child psychology, pathology, sense perception, sexology, consciousness science, Gestalt psychology, and aesthetic experience. Within Musil's "other condition," the mind was more fruitful than otherwise---a "moral fruitfulness"---and preconceived notions of good and evil, self and other were temporarily suspended. This state, far from a quietist piety, is associated by Musil with what I call an "other tradition" of mysticism, a tradition of heresy, independent thought, and radical re-visioning of an infinite number of possible realities.;Formal arrangements, whether aesthetic, ethical, or social, could, within the creative zone of this "other condition," shift, creating new arrangements of the world (abstractions) which had the potential force of conversion experiences. In this work I explore Musil's diverse readings on primitive anthropology, heretical medieval mysticisms (including Christian mysticism, Sufism, the occult), crime, and conversion and show how these readings are developed in Musil's great unfinished novel, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften , both formally (in reference to Musil's text) and philosophically. Discussions of traditional mystical questions of the magic of the Word, time and timelessness, self and other, longing and union are all explored with reference to Musil's aesthetic theory and practice.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
