Robert Musil: "Attempts to Find Another Human Being": MLA Convention Panel in Seattle

Monday, December 19, 2011

MLA Convention Panel in Seattle

If you are going to be anywhere near Seattle, on Sunday January 8th from 10:15-11:30 am, please come join me at the MLA . I am giving a paper at a panel called Heroic Idiocy and the Search for a Modernist Ethics. It will be at the Sheraton. These are the talks in the panel.

1. "Henry James and the Value of Stupidity," Matthew Sussman, Harvard Univ.
2. "On Stupidity and the Aesthetic of the Nonlinear Ethic in Robert Musil," Genese E. Grill, Community Coll. of Vermont
3. "The Few, the Proud, the Deluded: Borges's Foolish Heroes," Todd Garth, United States Naval Academy.

The real (secret) name of my talk is "Seeing Like an Imbecile".

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Attempts to Find Another Human Being

Around 1923 Musil planned to publish a collection of his essays under the title, "Versuche einen anderen Menschen zu finden" (Attempts to Find Another Human Being). In his notebooks he wrote:

"In fact, this could be the title for everything that I have ever written. I can think of no other excuse for spending one's whole life at a writing desk to become a beggar. [...] I can only imagine another duty with great difficulty. I have always been a writer, always pursued writing.
It has come to pass in my life that people have scolded me for it and have called me a sick human being, an intellectual, an unmoral human being, a scientist, in short, everything that I am not, and only with resistance, under the pressure of a few, people have become accustomed to thinking of me as what I believe myself to be, and want to be: a writer."