A major new study of Robert Musil by one of the world's leading Musil scholars. Musil's extraordinary works, the study reveals, emerged from the problem of the "two cultures." The modern era is marked by the separate life of two cultures of understanding, one derived from art and its discourses, the other from science and its practices. This "problem of the two cultures" (as coined by C.P. Snow) describes the difficulty of bringing these distinct ways of understanding the world together. The works of the Austrian author Robert Musil (1930-33) represent the most distinguished treatment of this problem in the modern era. Nevertheless, doubts persist about Musil's true intentions. Did he maintain that the separation between art and science could be resolved? Or did he rise above the problem by advocating a new order of being or "other condition" that would dispense with it altogether? Mehigan's study moves these questions to center stage. He lends new clarity to the debate about Musil's position in regard to the two cultures by shining a light on ethical questions the author ultimately wished to clarify. It is the shape of a hard-won ethics, Mehigan argues, that provides the key to an effective response to the problem of the two cultures - an ethics, in the end, that can only be put forward as a new kind of art. Tim Mehigan is Professor of German and Deputy Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland, Australia.

This superb study anchors and clarifies Musil's struggle with precision and soul in a destabilized, rapidly changing world. An extraordinary piece of work. - Burton Pike, Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature, CUNY Graduate Center, editor and (with Sophie Wilkins) co-translator of The Man without Qualities (1996) * . *
Musil scholarship is a crowded field, but Robert Musil and the Question of Science makes an exciting new contribution to understanding both The Man without Qualities and many of Musil's other texts, especially Unions and The Blackbird, not just as responses to science and rationalism, but as aesthetic attempts to pick up where science leaves off in the project of understanding what humans do and how and why they do it. - -- Geoffrey C. Howes, Professor Emeritus of German, Bowling Green State University, and translator of Musil's Three Women
Tim Mehigan's study rightfully brings to the fore key features of Musil's literary agenda: his reliance on scientific knowledge, the key influences of Mach and Nietzsche, his turning away from Kant's categorical imperative in order to promote an ethics based on singularity, his attempts to find a way out of the sterile opposition between adherence to rationality and the cultivation of intuition and feelings, and his vision of literature as a privileged terrain for imagining new ethical possibilities. -- Florence Vatan * MONATSHEFTE *