Musil Commentary

Research project P 14346 Musil Commentary Klaus AMANN 26.6.2000 The literary heritage of the Austrian writer Robert Musil (1880-1942) has gained great importance, due to the fact that he has become an author of undeniable prestige and that he was not able to publish an important part of his work after Hitler`s seizure of power. As a result of a long cooperative research project (involving the ÖFWF, the DFG, the University of Trier, the University of Munich and the University of Klagenfurt), Musils manuscripts had been published on CD-ROM in 1992 (edited by: Friedbert Aspetsberger, Karl Eibl and Adolf Frisé). The most important recent aim of the Musil philology is to complete the textual commentation on the corpus. As a part of a thesis at the University of Klagenfurt, a comprehensive essay was published on the genesis of Musil`s novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften in June 1999. This thesis is based on a detailed investigation of the compilation and chronology of the manuscripts. The author of this thesis, Walter Fanta, is going to prepare a second version of the CD-ROM edition, with further and updated comments on the texts. He is commissioned by the Robert Musil Institute of Literature Research at the University of Klagenfurt and also by the project of FWF, which he is applying for herewith. A new assignment of the categories "work assignment", "text elaboration" and "chronologization" for each manuscript is planned. Apart from that, a complete list of sources for the texts is to be given and the connections among Musil`s manuscripts are also to be shown in the form of so-called "hyperlinks". Most importantly, the databank is to be supplied with more than 20,000 local comments in the form of so-called "pop-ups" and also with 300500 comments after each section concerning historical, biographical and textual questions. The comments and the text corpus (which has been cleaned of errata) are to be published by means of the software "Folio View".