The Austrian novelist Hermann Broch ranks with Kafka and Musil among the three greatest 20th-century Austrian novelists and belongs to the century's most gifted novelists in German from whatever country. He established his reputation with The Sleepwalkers, a trilogy of political and philosophical novels. His best-known work is The Death of Virgil, a long, challenging work in a lyrical, exuberant, and sometimes nearly incomprehensible style, a kind of cerebral stream-of-consciousness of the dying Virgil. Broch also wrote extensively about modern art and architecture, Hofmannsthal, and mass psychology. He has a special connection to Yale, as he lived the last years of his life there after having escaped Austria in 1938. The participants in the Yale Symposium of April 2001 are among the world's most prominent Broch scholars. Fourteen of their presentations have been extensively revised for this volume, which focuses on Broch as critic and as novelist and dramatist. Topics include Broch's views on kitsch and art, and on drama; his cultural criticism; his cooperation with Borgese and Arendt; his theory of mass psychology; history in his works, Ernst Kretschmer's influence on him; Virgil and Celan's Atemwende; Jean Starr Untermeyer's translation of Virgil; guilt and the fall in Those without Guilt; and Broch reception in Japan. PAUL MICHAEL L?TZELER is Distinguished University Professor of German at Washington University St. Louis and editor of Broch's collected works. MATTHIAS KONZETT is associate professor of German at Yale; WILLY RIEMER is associate professor of German at the University of Delaware, and CHRISTA SAMMONS is curator of the German collections of the Beinecke Library at Yale.
Author(s): Paul Michael Lutzeler, Matthias Konzett, Willy Riemer
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 280
CONTENTS
......Page 8
EDITOR'S PREFACE
......Page 12
INTRODUCTION:
Broch, Our Contemporary......Page 16
I. Hermann Broch: The Critic......Page 26
Kitsch and Art: Broch’s Essay
“Das Böse im Wertsystem der Kunst”......Page 28
Erneuerung des Theaters?:
Broch’s Ideas on Drama in Context......Page 36
“Der Rhythmus der Ideen”:
On the Workings of Broch’s Cultural Criticism......Page 52
“Kurzum die Hölle”:
Broch’s Early Political Text “Die Straße”......Page 70
Visionaries in Exile: Broch’s Cooperation
with G. A. Borgese and Hannah Arendt......Page 82
Fear in Culture: Broch’s Massenwahntheorie......Page 104
II. Hermann Broch: The Novelist and Dramatist......Page 120
Inscriptions of Power:
Broch’s Narratives of History in Die Schlafwandler......Page 122
The German Colonial Aftermath:
Broch’s 1903. Esch oder die Anarchie......Page 140
Neither Sane nor Insane: Ernst Kretschmer’s
Influence on Broch’s Early Novels......Page 152
Non-Contemporaneity of the Contemporaneous:
Broch’s Novel Die Verzauberung......Page 162
“Great Theater” and “Soap Bubbles”:
Broch the Dramatist......Page 174
A Farewell to Art:
Poetic Reflection in Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil......Page 202
Poetry as Perjury: The End of Art in Broch’s
Der Tod des Vergil and Celan’s Atemwende......Page 216
“Beyond Words”: The Translation of Broch’s
Der Tod des Vergil by Jean Starr Untermeyer......Page 232
Broch Reception in Japan:
Shin’ichiro Nakamura and Die Schuldlosen......Page 246
NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS
......Page 268
INDEX OF BROCH'S WORKS
......Page 272
INDEX OF NAMES
......Page 274
