Name: Theater Symptoms: Plays and Writings on Drama, Paperback/Robert Musil
Brand: Contra Mundum Press
Price: 203.99 RON
Availability: InStock

Descriere & specificații

Although known principally for his modernist masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities , Robert Musil (1880-1942) was also a playwright and drama critic. Musil's plays and theatrical investigations, written between 1921-1929, are inseparable form his later literary work and from his life-long commitment to art as a social and cultural activity. His brilliant plays and critical writings are not minor aspects of his artistic life, bu essential works, preparing the way for and intrinsically connected to his great, unfinished novel. In the theater of the fraught period between the two world wars, Musil recognized a crisis that was symptomatic of larger social, political, and aesthetic problems. In seeing Art as a social and cultural stimulus, he leveled piercing critiques at the commodification and conformism of the Culture Industry of his time and pointed the way toward a living, transformative theater. As an observer and researcher of the psychology of aesthetic experience, a student of anthropology and mysticism, and a writer who sometimes practiced the art of literature like an essayist and scientific experimenter, Musil saw in theater the ideal testing ground for questions about perception, reality, and the effects of ritual practices like formal variation, repetition, and the suspension of normal consciousness. In contrast to the mostly shallow entertainment on offer, Musil saw the potential of theater -- and all of art -- as a force that could incite existential shattering of