Book, Essays by Robert Musil, 1900-1919[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. Celebrated for The Man Without Qualities, one of the most striking and important literary creations of the 20th century, Robert Musil has equally notable productions, but little known to the Brazilian public, such as the two novels that make up Uniões (Perspectiva, 2018), written by a More mature Musil, and now this tasty collection of essays by the younger Musil – of texts produced between 1900 and 1919 –, with critical reviews, self-criticisms and small narratives in which the author's great talent can already be seen. They are essays translated from German by professor and researcher Kathrin Rosenfield, who also writes the complementary texts and notes. FOURTH COVER Robert Musil, one of the most notable writers of the 20th century, author of the monumental The Man Without Qualities, continued without completing the project of releasing a book of essays. Here, professor and researcher Kathrin Rosenfield brings a vigorous selection of them and the author's “little prose”. We will find a young Musil remarkable for the sincerity with which he elaborates the objective problems of the world based on his own intimate experience. In merciless self-analysis, he reviews the attachments and resistances he shared with his contemporaries; It does not place itself above or apart from them when criticizing the pseudo-religious elan reproduced in aesthetic enthusiasms, convictions and unquestionable political dogmas. He explains the conflict between worldly spirituality at the end of the 19th century with the still barely sketched challenges of scientific and technological modernity – and the unconscious, almost repressed resistance to the inevitable consequences of that same modernity. The texts from the first two decades collected in this volume show how Musil frees himself from his idiosyncratic attachments by scrutinizing the phenomena he observes and fictionalizing his own experience. Rosenfield also adds an entire informative apparatus, aiming to provide the reader with a better understanding of a time and an author whose shadows and light still project upon us with all their force today. FROM THE COVER Cover image: portrait of Robert Musil. TEXTS COLLECTION The Texts collection is dedicated to great texts by great authors, Brazilian and international, in the fields of literature, dramaturgy, criticism and philosophy. Its purpose is to present a panel of the lives and work of these writers and thinkers, their work itself and critical essays that demonstrate its vitality and importance for the Brazilian reader. EXCERPT Scientific prose also has an aesthetic side. It cannot be excluded from the formation of concepts. The tension between form and content is characteristic. For the same content we can find the most diverse forms. They “add something”, but do not change the essentials. Precisely on this lies the suitability of language for scientific communication. In the case of the essay, we clearly see a difference depending on the object – so to speak, according to its distance from scientific treatment. If we take, for example, Maeterlinck or some intuitive mystic (whose prose belongs to the essay, not the scientific treatise), we move from clarity to the gloom of words. The things that must be said here cannot be said directly. The available collection of intentional relationships is not enough. Nor in combinations, as in scientists' definitions. This arises when we enter the religious, aesthetic, ethical and individual domain. In place of description comes periphrasis. The circumlocution, which is a rodeo. What stands out in relief is a somewhat blurred image of something veiled. Also in finer gradients in light tones. Veils are possible in the most diverse ways. We can establish, with the clarity that is generally possible here, when X means more or less the same thing as Y. In this, he can make use of other thoughts and other means of prose. Seen from the essential core, the content of the whole does not conform to the form. Although it is only possible to find periphrases for it through units of form and content. The image, the tone of the diction, the hiatus and everything that radiates from the form is individually important; however, in their midst, thoughts with objective significance are also important. Here, form and content partially diverge. Furthermore, the essay purely focused on factual prose also has formal values, in its construction, in its progress, in what mathematicians call the beauty of the proof process, and things like that. SUMMARY Short Biography of Robert Musil (1880-1942) Essay Selection Criteria (1900-1919) Preface – K. Rosenfield ESSAYS 1900-1919 Part 1: FROM JUVENILE FRAGMENTS TO FICTIONAL SKETCHES 1. Some Notes from Notebooks/Diaries – For the Fantasy Setting Paderewski ¤ Mr. RM's Judgment About Himself (For His 21st Birthday) ¤ Reflections on Franzensberg Hill in the City of Brünn Am Franzensberg ¤ Mr. Musil's Conversation With Mr. Musil ¤ Conversation with Colleague Von Allesch ¤ About History II ¤ Theoretical Considerations regarding the Life of a Poet ¤ [About Morals] ¤ The Morals We Seek ¤ Quantifiability of Morals: The Poet's Morals ¤ Epigraph:... R. Profile of a Program ¤ Profile of a Program ¤ [ About Criticism] Part 2: FROM ESSAYS TO SHORT FICTIONAL PROSE 3. Essays, Chronicles and Reviews on Books of Essays (September 1913) ¤ The Obscene and the Sick in Art (March 1, 1911) ¤ Spirit [Religious], Modernism and Metaphysics (February 1912) ¤ Politics in Austria (December 1912) ¤ Analysis and Synthesis (15 November 1913) ¤ Political Creed of a Young Man. A Fragment (November 1913) ¤ Ethical Fertility ¤ The Mathematical Man ¤ [About the Essay] ¤ Literary Chronicle/The Humanity That Writes ¤ Notes on a Metapsychic ¤ Literary Chronicle: The Novel as a Problem [About Kafka and Walser] ¤ The End of War ¤ Outline on the Poet's Way of Knowledge ¤ The Austrians of Buridan 4. 1908-1914 Short Critical and Literary Prose (Emerging from Notes and Critical Observation) The Misty Autumn of Grisolho ¤ About the Books of Robert Musil ¤ O Papel Pega -Flies 5. Epilogue and Transition to the Interwar Period The Post-Writing Blackbird: The Time of Musil in Entries – K. Rosenfield Index of Names Bibliography and Acronyms Acknowledgments