Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Broch’s Life and Works
- 1 Perspectives on Broch’s Die Schlafwandler: Narratives of History and the Self
- 2 Hermann Broch and the Dilemma of Literature in the Modern Age
- 3 Interrogating Modernity: Hermann Broch’s Postromanticism
- 4 Broch and the Theater: Die Entsühnung and Aus der Luft gegriffen as Tragic and Comic Dramatizations of the Economic Machine
- 5 Limits of the Scientific: Broch’s Die Unbekannte Größe
- 6 Broch’s Die Verzauberung: Ludwig Klages and the Bourgeois Mitläufer
- 7 Hermann Broch’s Massenwahnprojekt and Its Relevance for Our Times
- 8 Human Rights and the Intellectual’s Ethical Duty: Broch’s Political Writings
- 9 Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil: Art and Power, Language and the Ineffable
- 10 From the “Tierkreis-Erzählungen” to Die Schuldlosen: The Creation of Broch’s Last Novel
- 11 Broch’s Legacy and Resonance
- Selected Bibliography
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Broch’s Life and Works
- 1 Perspectives on Broch’s Die Schlafwandler: Narratives of History and the Self
- 2 Hermann Broch and the Dilemma of Literature in the Modern Age
- 3 Interrogating Modernity: Hermann Broch’s Postromanticism
- 4 Broch and the Theater: Die Entsühnung and Aus der Luft gegriffen as Tragic and Comic Dramatizations of the Economic Machine
- 5 Limits of the Scientific: Broch’s Die Unbekannte Größe
- 6 Broch’s Die Verzauberung: Ludwig Klages and the Bourgeois Mitläufer
- 7 Hermann Broch’s Massenwahnprojekt and Its Relevance for Our Times
- 8 Human Rights and the Intellectual’s Ethical Duty: Broch’s Political Writings
- 9 Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil: Art and Power, Language and the Ineffable
- 10 From the “Tierkreis-Erzählungen” to Die Schuldlosen: The Creation of Broch’s Last Novel
- 11 Broch’s Legacy and Resonance
- Selected Bibliography
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
Some sixty-five years after his death in American exile in 1951, the Austrian Jewish writer Hermann Broch is today ranked alongside contemporaries such as Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and James Joyce as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. Among his works are the multilayered trilogy Die Schlafwandler, a modernist masterpiece that draws the reader, via the increasingly alienated psyches of its three protagonists, into the social and cultural fragmentation of the age; and the hypnotically lyrical Der Tod des Vergil, which articulates the experience of mortality and the conflict of art and political power at the end of an era.
Broch’s encounter with social disintegration and the rise of fascism gave a critical urgency and depth to his fiction. It also impelled him, a profoundly humane individual with a strong sense of social responsibility, to produce wide-ranging and often innovative works of cultural criticism, philosophy, mass psychology, and political theory that not only confronted the ideological crisis of his era but also pointed beyond that crisis to the emergence of a new secular/humanitarian ethos. His attempt to give universal human rights a foundation for the modern age has a powerful resonance for our times.
Broch’s work is widely available in translation, and his novels feature on German Studies programs and university courses on modern European literature throughout the Anglophone world. Nevertheless, his writings deserve to be more widely known than they are, and this Companion represents a contribution to that end. Written by an international team of Broch experts, with English translations of German-language material, it draws on the latest research to present an up-to-date and in-depth study of the writer and his works, covering both his novels and key areas of his philosophical and scientific writings. A concluding selected bibliography provides guidance for further reading in both English and German.
This Companion places its author’s life and work in the context of his turbulent times. We hope it also shows how he can speak to our dislocated present.
The Editors
July 2018
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch , pp. vii - viiiPublisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019