Neither Inside nor Outside
"Subjectivity and the Spaces of Modernity in Robert Musil's "The Man without Qualities
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4070830 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sofia Jonsson (0000-0003-2007-3736, corresponding author), Stefan Jonsson (0000-0001-5462-3041) |
| Year | 1996 |
| Issue | 68 |
| Pages | 31 |
| Publication date | 1996-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New German Critique (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0094-033X • E-ISSN: 1558-1462 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3108663 |
| OpenAlex | W1998891324 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
Robert Musil once wrote short essay about doors. He presented rather eccentric thesis: Doors are thing of the past, even if back doors are still said to crop up at architectural competitions.1 Indulging in the quasi-scientific jargon that is standard feature of his shrewd satire, Musil defines the door as a rectangular wooden frame set in the wall, on which moveable board is fastened. The point, according to Musil, is that this piece of wood loses its function in modernity. It belongs to an earlier stage of social development. Or at least this is what he is able to maintain, since he refrains from considering the basic, arguably timeless functions of doors, like shutting out the cold or keeping strangers away. In explaining why doors have lost their importance, he instead presents bizarre literary motif as his supporting argument: the door used to be the place behind which one could listen to what was said in the next room, what secrets you could sometimes hear! The count had disowned his stepdaughter, and the hero, who was supposed to marry her, heard just in time that they planned to poison him. The door is here described as an instrument of knowledge. It allows for espionage, fulfilling crucial function for clandestine operations in
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Modernity · Subjectivity · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,13 |
| Citation span | 2002 - 2011 (10) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |