Home Literary Studies Robert Musil und die österreichische Avantgarde oder »Der -Ismus vergeht, die Dummheit besteht«
Chapter
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Robert Musil und die österreichische Avantgarde oder »Der -Ismus vergeht, die Dummheit besteht«

  • Birgit Nübel
Become an author with De Gruyter Brill
2023/2024
This chapter is in the book 2023/2024

Abstract

Although Robert Musil is not an author who figures in research on the historical avant-garde, he was seen by contemporaries as one of its pioneers and companions. In the context of the Viennese/Austrian avant-garde of the 1910s, he initially regarded literary activism favourably and became actively involved in it. Against the backdrop of the November Revolution and his reading of Thomas Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918), this stance gave way to one of critical distance in which he set himself apart from it, even polemically rejecting it. In his feuilletons on art exhibitions from the early 1920s, Musil then adopts an experimental perspective regarding contemporary ›isms‹, one that modulates and relativizes the rate at which they give way to one another. He does this by setting forms of the avant-garde in art alongside those of tradition, thereby developing a relational, polychronic, and multifaceted concept of modernity.

Abstract

Although Robert Musil is not an author who figures in research on the historical avant-garde, he was seen by contemporaries as one of its pioneers and companions. In the context of the Viennese/Austrian avant-garde of the 1910s, he initially regarded literary activism favourably and became actively involved in it. Against the backdrop of the November Revolution and his reading of Thomas Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918), this stance gave way to one of critical distance in which he set himself apart from it, even polemically rejecting it. In his feuilletons on art exhibitions from the early 1920s, Musil then adopts an experimental perspective regarding contemporary ›isms‹, one that modulates and relativizes the rate at which they give way to one another. He does this by setting forms of the avant-garde in art alongside those of tradition, thereby developing a relational, polychronic, and multifaceted concept of modernity.

Downloaded on 5.2.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111617725-005/html
Scroll to top button