Nov 182013
 

Totentanz

I just discovered the post and this site through the good offices of Judith Stout on Twitter (@judithstout1). The blogger is Genese Grill, author of The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities: Possibility as Reality, and the site is full of fascinating items. And this is just a taste of what Grill has to say about Musil and stupidity; she has written a full length paper which you can read here in the journal Studia Austriaca.

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While looking for images of Death I discovered that not only is stupidity often a woman, but death (which is not a feminine noun in German) often is too. In this image (Totentanz by Karl Ritter, 1922) she may merely be death’s lure, if not herself the one condemned to die. Well, woman, at least, is effective, rousing to life, to frustration, to anger, challenging passive man to sin, to madness, leading him to distraction, destruction, eventually to death.

Read the rest at Robert Musil: “Attempts to Find Another Human Being”: Stupidity, Being Towards Death, Art (on Dostoevsky’s Idiot).

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