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Reading Foreign Bodies in Musil’s Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika
- Journal of Austrian Studies
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 45, Numbers 3-4, Fall/Winter 2012
- pp. 61-86
- 10.1353/oas.2012.0037
- Article
- Additional Information
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Criticism of Robert Musil’s Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika has often understood the representation of the “foreign body” in the novella as a reference to psychoanalysis or trauma. Working through all versions and revisions of this novella, this article instead analyzes the theme of the foreign body broadly conceived as a dilemma of the split between the self and the objectified other. The problems caused by this split provide a thematic commentary on the novella’s widely recognized difficulty, which emerges as a consequence of Musil’s strained attempts to design a work that is intended to be felt rather than understood in terms that would objectify it.