HUAS83001 - Man Without Qualities

Course Description

Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities is one of the most prestigious novels of the 20th century that no one has read but everyone has heard of. Even though it is very long, very slow, and was unfinished at the time of Robert Musil's death, it is a masterpiece of extraordinary wit, complexity, and intelligence. Regularly cited alongside Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Man Without Qualities is a triumph of high modernism. Set in Vienna in 1913, it depicts a world on the edge of a precipice—moral, cultural and political—that was to give way to the abyss of World War I the following year. In this course we will follow Musil’s protagonist Ulrich—a gifted, amoral, concupiscent mathematician of good family who finds himself in the midst of an existential crisis and becomes one of the most engaging comic anti-heroes in modern fiction.