"With exemplary depth and clarity this fine book analyzes Musil's concept of "essayism" as Musil's alternative approach to the concepts of Modernism on which philosophy has run aground. Freed, respecting Musil as a writer who had an informed philosophical background, places his way of thinking against rigorous analyses of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Habermas, Lyotard, Latour, Mach, Foucault, Derrida, and others. ... Read more A major addition to Musil studies and philosophic discussion."
Burton Pike, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA, and co-translator (with Sophie Wilkins) of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities (Vintage, 1996). "Mark Freed's Robert Musil and the NonModern builds a strong case for including Musil among the giants of modern literature, precisely by challenging the basis of the modern. Musil's ‘Essayismus', the philosophical view that permeates his great novel, becomes in Freed's reading, a device of ‘non-modernism,' which questions existing formulas and finds the modern in the postmodern and the postmodern in the modern. Appealing to Lyotard and Latour as his guides, the author leads us to Musil via Habermas and Heidegger, in terms that are as clear as possible, given the terrain. The interplay of literature and philosophy shines forth in this work of great quality."
Ruth V. Gross, Professor of German and Department Head, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, North Carolina State University, USA Robert Musil and the NonModern offers the most exciting reading to date of Musil's experimental method, his essayism, and his uncompromising openness to the hope of a lived utopia. http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/there-will-be-no-more-great-ideas/
Open Letters Monthly website Many Musil scholars continue to mine his notebooks and diaries for the often multilayered sources of his characters and ideas. Others, however, have engaged in a different, more adventurous project, one that goes beyond the author’s own cultural-historical horizon in order to bring his 'crisis of modernity' into dialogue with wider arguments about the modern and postmodern. Mark Freed’s exhilarating book is one of the latest editions to this Musil-meets-Lyotard subgenre. His aim, however, is to ‘[read] Musil alongside canonical postmoderns’ in order to ‘introduce Musil scholars and those working in the problematics of postmodernism to one another’s interests’ (11). In this respect, he has succeeded admirably.
Modernism/Modernity (Vol 20, No. 1, Jan 2013) Show Less