Robert Musil

Robert Musil is one of the great Modernist writers, but his private thoughts have long been unavailable to English readers. Diaries translates passages from his personal daybooks spanning over four decades from the turn of the century to his death. It documents the creative process behind The Man Without Qualities, while providing a window into a Vienna simmering with the ideas of Freud and Wittgenstein.

Readers will gain keen insights into Musil's passage from scientist, to soldier, to novelist, in honest passages that reveal the man in all his humor, ambition, frustration, and transcendence. Serving up irony with mathematical precision, Diaries dramatizes the "disappearance" of self experienced by modern man ("without qualities"). With Musil's reputation and visibility boosted due to the recent release of a vastly improved translation of his legendary novel, Diaries will attract a major audience of old and new fans.

"Nebel shows us too how aware some artists are of the discrepancy between what they see in their imagination and what they are able to produce. . . . The accounts of the emotions of these people and the anecdotes are very readable and it is interesting to learn why some artists feel they have to destroy their work."—BRITISH JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS

Can we ever really answer the question, "who am I"? In this remarkably clear, fresh and persuasive treatment of a long-standing philosophical question, Jopling argues that we can acquire self-knowledge, but that our attempts to know ourselves shape and alter the very self that is their object; that is, the self we come to know is dependent on how it is known.

The Encyclopedia of the Essay is the first reference work entirely devoted to the essay as a genre.

Coverage begins with Montaigne, the first essayist, and stretches forward to Addison and Steele, The Spectator and The Tatler, Marivaux, William Hazlitt, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Robert Musil, Theodor Adorno, Nouvelle Revue francaise, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and across the ocean to Emerson and Thoreau, E.B. White, The New Yorker and Harper's, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion -- while also looking back to classical and medieval precursors.

More than 400 writers from around the world are included, along with geographic surveys that provide an historical framework, entries on types of essays, and entries on important single essays. Entries on closely-related genres such as letters, journals, treatises, sermons and reviews expand and explore the fluid boundaries of the essay as genre.

Between 1933 & 1938, Eric Voegelin published four books that expressly stated his opposition to the increasingly powerful Hitler regime. As a result, he was forced to leave his homeland in 1938. Twenty years later, he returned to Germany as a professor of political science at Ludwig-Maximilian University. Voegelin's homecoming allowed him the opportunity to voice once again his opinions on the Nazi regime & its aftermath. In 1964 at the University of Munich, Voegelin gave a series of memorable lectures on what he considered "the central German experiential problem" of his time: Adolf Hitler's rise to power, the reasons for it, & its consequences for post-Nazi Germany. For Voegelin, these questions demanded a scrutiny of the mentality of individual Germans & of the order of German society during & after the Nazi period. Hitler & the Germans, published here for the first time, offers Voegelin's most extensive & detailed critique of the Hitler era. Voegelin interprets this era in terms of the basic diagnostic tools provided by the philosophy of Plato & Aristotle, Judeo-Christian culture, & contemporary German-language writers like Heimito von Doderer, Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, & Robert Musil. His inquiry uncovers a historiography that was substantially unhistoric: a German Evangelical Church that misinterpreted the Gospel, a German Catholic Church that denied universal humanity, & a legal process enmeshed in criminal homicide. Hitler & the Germans provides a profound alternative approach to the topic of the individual German's entanglement in the Hitler regime & its continuing implications. This comprehensive reading of the Nazi period has yet to be matched.