EXISTENCE AS ESSAY: NIETZSCHE, MUSIL, AND CONRAD (GERMAN, FRENCH, ENGLISH).
Item
-
Title
-
EXISTENCE AS ESSAY: NIETZSCHE, MUSIL, AND CONRAD (GERMAN, FRENCH, ENGLISH).
-
Identifier
-
AAI8423065
-
identifier
-
8423065
-
Creator
-
HARRISON, THOMAS.
-
Contributor
-
Lillian Feder | Burton Pike
-
Date
-
1984
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, Comparative
-
Abstract
-
This study considers the work of Robert Musil and Joseph Conrad to be a logical development of thoughts explicitly or implicitly addressed by Friedrich Nietzsche. The idea of a development must be sharply distinguished from that of influences and affinities; it is rather a question of original and complementary treatments of the same issues: the indefinite nature of reality, man's role as interpreter of the world, as forger of his destiny within the stringent limits of fate, the impossibility of "being oneself," and the need to define morality anew. Within the context of these issues, Musil, Conrad, and Nietzsche illumine each other's writings often--rethinking each other's logic, furthering individual points, or stating explicitly what the work of the others leaves unspoken.;The fundamental theme which emerges from this reading of Nietzsche, Musil, and Conrad is that existence is equivalent to an essay--an attempt to attain a goal (both moral and ontological), a continuous "trial" and "being on the way" toward an end which cannot be achieved. This essay is at once a metaphysic, an ethic, and an aesthetic: a mode of living and writing in which man appropriates the process of endless interpretation to which he is already destined. This process remains open precisely through man's determination to end it, through his endeavor to overcome fictitious values and attain "authentic" ones. To live life as an essay does not mean to posit value but, as Nietzsche writes, to transvaluate them. Thus the only (')Ubermensch that is possible is one who is thoroughly and consciously human, accepting his finitude and servitude to fate, and embracing the strife between reality and possibility, fact and desire, individual powerlessness and the will to power. To be an artist of life, as Nietzsche and Musil deliberately demand and Conrad's protagonists become forced to recognize, is to confront one's fragmentation and discover one's unity within it.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
Comparative Literature
