In this study on literature and thought from the early 20th century, I examine techniques of organization – including rhetoric, poetics and citation – across the work of the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) and the Austrian writer Robert Musil (1880-1942). With particular attention to Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, this dissertation analyzes the prose strategies, by which the authors develop a poetics of orientation. Responding to shifts in the epistemological foundations of the empirical sciences, the authors reimagine genre and style as a way to direct the reader in the interpretive process. Although the inflection of this poetics of orientation differs in Cassirer’s cultural philosophy and Musil’s essays and narrative, they both follow dynamic moments in thought, the drama that unfolds as the interpersonal experience of making sense of the world. The displacement of substance by function in the sciences provides the shared ground against which the patterns of their prose emerge. In the first section, “Ernst Cassirer. Problemgeschichte: from genre to texture”, I engage Cassirer’s shift from a critique of reason to a critique of culture, in which language and myth are treated alongside theoretical knowledge as interfaces for knowing the world. His mode of thought develops in a mode of writing, modifying the philosophical genre Problemgeschichte, which developed in the 19th century and was the dominant mode of philosophy among Neo-Kantians at the turn of the 19th to 20th century. He extends the genre’s diction of direction, such as the ubiquitous terms Richtung and Weg, with a decidedly mathematical accent. This figural register reflects the epistemic shift from substance to function, which also typifies his characterization of problems as sites of discursive interference. Building on this discussion of the philosophical genre Problemgeschichte, I then analyze narrative aspects of Cassirer’s writing, such as focalization, in order to understand how his play of citation demonstrates functional thinking. In the second section, “Orientation: Robert Musil’s Reise vom Hundertsten ins Tausendste”, I follow Musil’s prose detours as an intentional gambit, connecting heterogeneous intellectual inquiry. Arguing that his prose innovation cannot be exhausted by a discussion of his essayistic style, I challenge standard accounts of the dissolution of narrative in Musil’s writing. The shift from substance to function as the epistemological foundation in the empirical sciences informs Musil’s displacement of narrative schema by narrative impulses, which preserves traces of traditional story telling as devices for helping the reader find their way in a textual space. Both Cassirer’s and Musil’s poetics of orientation demonstrate engagement with the tumultuous Interwar period, which counters anti-Enlightenment tendencies of intellectual inquiry, common in the German-language cultural production of the early 20th century. The authors’ prose strategies are the vehicle for an intellectual vision, which maintains the potential for an open future.

My dissertation, In the Beginning was the Sign, examines the entangled histories of literary modernism and mathematical modernity and revisits their claim to a radical rupture with the past. Informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis, media theory, and deconstruction, I trace how the interplay of literary and mathematical form transformed classical imaginations of the human. Authors like Carl Einstein, Robert Musil or Ernst Cassirer challenge the organic concept of subject formation as Bildung with a new and purely symbolic kind of mathematical abstraction that informs their writing on both thematic and formal levels. In the tradition of Plato’s Meno, they adduce these new forms of mathematical knowledge to find genuinely modern answers to the classical question of the good life. Paradoxically, in striving to portray their own time as a radical novelty that was able to break with its cultural heritage, these authors summon the canon at its most canonical. The mathematician Hilbert, for instance, rewrites the opening of the Gospel of John, translating logos as ‘sign’ rather than ‘word.’ Analyzing literary, philosophical, and mathematical texts in German, English, and French, I show that the questioning of the logical foundations of thought in the so-called foundational crisis in mathematics was re-mediated through a new genealogical exploration of the foundations of European rationality in the texts of classical antiquity.

This thesis examines the literary dream in selected works by Kafka, Kubin, Meyrink, Musil and Schnitzler, with a particular focus on the redefinition of subjectivity through dreamlife. The introductory chapter contextualises these case studies in the broader field of oneirocriticism, emphasising the dream's ancient role as fixtional template and its specific significance in the destabilised environment of German Central Europe during the early twentieth century. Alfred Kubin's Die andere Seite (1909), which uses the 'other side' as metaphor for both oneiric and artistic experience, reveals the inherent dualism of the literary dream and its close relationship with creativity. In Robert Musil's Die Verwirrungen des Zdglings Tdrlefi (1906), the protagonist serves as the model for a new type of self-determining subject who draws on the knowledge of dreams and irrationality. Franz Kafka's texts reveal techniques for integrating the dream into fictional worlds that are already dreamlike through the prevalence of (literalised) metaphor and free association. Gustav Meyrink, in Der Golem (1915), shares Kafka's interest in concretised metaphor, but also explores the dream's associations with occult practices, used as a defence against the threatening claims of science. Finally, Arthur Schnitzler's literary dreams offer a direct confrontation with psychoanalysis and a dismantling of nineteenth-century ideals of gender and bourgeois love. Overall, it is argued that the literary dreams by these authors hold varied responses to fragmentation of the Ich in the face of psychological 'vivisection', theories of relativity, and the collapse of old social orders. The dream, as a nightly 'psychosis', crystallised the pervasive fears of self-loss during this period; however, in its perennial role as micro-narrative, it also provided a site for re-construction of the subject. The incorporation of dreams in fictional lives served as a metonymical guide for the integration of un- and subconscious experience overall.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:32:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2010-05-07Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T18:06:49Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 pinto_amsm_dr_arafcl.pdf: 734208 bytes, checksum: f83aa1d753ff4071f309c01a9aadead1 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Em “A construção do romance moderno de adolescência em Raul Pompéia e em Robert Musil - em busca de uma visão didática” – foram elencadas duas obras literárias que são o objeto da pesquisa. São dois romances, um do escritor austríaco Robert Musil (1880-1942), O Jovem Törless (1906) e o outro do escritor brasileiro Raul Pompéia (1863-1895) O Ateneu (1888). Os dois romances tematizam a vida de adolescente dos dois protagonistas – Sérgio de O Ateneu e Törless de O Jovem Törless - em colégio interno masculino e a luta interior de cada um deles diante dos fatos biológicos, psicológicos e sociais em que se sentem envolvidos. No entanto, há algo de diferente além das semelhanças entre esses dois romances. Dessa percepção surgiu a idéia de um estudo comparativo entre as duas obras. Um aspecto importante foi constatar que os dois pré-adolescentes seguirão seus destinos como o de todos os meninos de bom nível sócio-econômico da Europa e do Brasil da época. Cada um deles irá frequentar colégios de renome em sua sociedade, os preferidos pelos pais abastados e esclarecidos, em regime de internato, e suas trajetórias, que podem ser vistas como aparentemente paralelas, irão desembocar em situações sociais, culturais e artísticas distintas. Os dois livros foram publicados, um pouco antes (O Ateneu) – e um pouco depois (O Jovem Törless), do surgimento da psicanálise, o que nos leva a considerações sobre a importância de Freud para essa passagem do século XIX para o século XX. Diante das características presentes nos dois romances foi proposta uma pesquisa que abordou a problemática da adolescência não apenas no seu aspecto temático, mas, principalmente, no da construção literária dos romances que a exploram. Trata-se da compreensão de como a adolescência é representada nesses romances e como tais representações se inserem em seus respectivos... / In “The construction of the modern novel of adolescence in Raul Pompéia and in Robert Musil – in search of a didactic vision”, two literary works were included that are the object of this research. These are two novels, one by Austrian writer Robert Musil (1880-1942), Young Törless (1906), and the other by Brazilian writer Raul Pompéia (1863-1895), The Athenian (O Ateneu) (1888). The two novels thematize the adolescent life of the two characters – Sérgio, in The Athenian, and Törless, in Young Törless – in a boarding school for boys, and their inner struggles to face the biological, psychological and social facts in which they feel involved. However, besides the similarities between these two novels, there is something different. This perception led to the idea of a comparative study of the two works. An important aspect was the finding that these two preadolescents will follow their destinies like those of all boys of a good socioeconomic level in Europe and Brazil in those times. Each of them will attend well known boarding schools in their society, chosen by their wealthy and well educated parents, but their trajectories, which can be seen as apparently parallel, will lead them into distinct social, cultural and artistic situations. The Athenian was published shortly before and Young Törless shortly after the emergence of psychoanalysis, which leads us to considerations about the importance of Freud in this passage from the 19th to the 20th century. In view of the characteristics of these two novels, a research was proposed to examine the problem of adolescence not only in its thematic aspect, but principally in the literary construction of the novels that explore the subject. This research seeks to understand how adolescence is represented in these novels, and how these representations are inserted within their particular cultural, social and historical contexts, ...(Complete abstract click electronic address below)