Implied Dramaturgy: Robert Musil and the Crisis of Modern Drama (Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture, and Thought)

This study aims to assess Robert Musil's contribution to the praxis and poetics of drama by placing his dramatic efforts in the context of the development of modern drama. Musil's involvement in the dramatic genre coincides with a period marked by a profound reorientation of drama, delimited by the realism of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Hauptmann on the one hand, and the radical redefinition of the nature and function of drama in Brecht's 'epic theater' on the other. Close readings of Musil's published plays as well as a discussion of his numerous unfinished dramatic projects and his theoretical reflections on drama show how Musil participated in the intense quest for dramatic forms appropriate to the experience of modernity. offering responses to what Peter Szondi has described as the 'crisis of modern drama.'
A central concern of Musil's 'implied dramaturgy' is the question of whether modern drama is capable of offering its audience a kind of collective aesthetic experience that could be a modern equivalent of the cathartic effect that Aristotle has ascribed to tragedy.