Ein Autor von ›hypertropher Virilität‹. Geschlecht in der Musil-Rezeption der 1920er und 1930er Jahre

Adopting "The Man Without Qualities" as a decisively masculine novel, contemporary literary criticism passed on a trope with which reviewers such as Alfred Döblin, Robert Müller and Franz Blei had already characterised Musil’s earlier texts. The reviews of the novel are therefore typical of how evaluations in terms of originality in the literary-critical and poetological debates of the 20s and 30s were regularly translated into the established gender hierarchy. The need to make such judgements can be seen as much as the symptom of a modern consciousness of crisis in masculinity as the hyper-athletics of the novel’s hero himself and the pitiful figure cut by the other men in "The Man Without Qualities".

Cosmos and Colonialism. Alexander von Humboldt in Cultural Criticism

Alexander von Humboldt explored the Spanish Empire on the verge of its collapse (1799–1804). He is the most significant German travel writer and the most important mediator between Europe and the Americas of the nineteenth century. His works integrated knowledge from two dozen domains. Today, he is at the center of debates on imperial discourse, postcolonialism, and globalization. This collection of fifty essays brings together a range of responses, many presented here for the first time in English. Authors from Schiller, Chateaubriand, Sarmiento, and Nietzsche, to Robert Musil, Kurt Tucholsky, Ernst Bloch, and Alejo Carpentier paint the historical background. Essays by contemporary travel writers and recent critics outline the current controversies on Humboldt. The source materials collected here will be indispensable to scholars of German, French, and Latin and North American literature as well as cultural and postcolonial studies, history, art history, and the history of science.