Mr. Waggish has a new post about Robert Musil, in which a new book on Musil by Genese Grill is discussed.The Monist's deadline for papers for its Musil issue has just passed. Achille Varzi, a philosophy professor at Columbia University (who was a tutor in my first logic class), has contributed a paper on the Confusions of Young Törleß, a draft of which is available as a pdf.
At Wuthering Expectations, Amateur Reader is on a pre-WWI Austrian lit kick, with posts on Hofmannsthal, Zweig, and Schnitzler.
From the Vienna Review: 'It is perhaps less well-known that [Arthur] Schnitzler also wrote for the cinema. Intrigued by the new medium and its language – shifting perspectives, the use of close-ups and montage techniques – Schnitzler wrote altogether nine film scripts based on his works and left a number of sketches for new projects.'
How did I not know that Stefan Zweig's post-secondary education was in philosophy? He completed a dissertation on Hippolyte Taine. It was supervised by Friedrich Jodl (source), who also supervised Otto Weininger.
Douglas Glover on Thomas Bernhard's The Loser.
M.A.Orthofer's new review of Franz Werfel's Pale Blue Ink in a Lady's Hand (reviewed last year by Brooke Allen), and Liel Leibovitz's review of Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.
There's a new website devoted to Hermann Ungar, who attended the same school in Brno as Ernst Weiss.
From an interview with translator Mark Corner about Jaroslav Hašek: 'I have a colleague at the university where I teach in Brussels, who always says to me, "If you want a new idea, read an old book." ... I think that Hašek is still very relevant, and the sense of being a traveler in a disordered universe does bear some parallels with the modern day.'
