Interkulturalität und Temporalität in Robert Musils Grigia.

The paper aims at revealing the interconnection between cultural and temporal alterities in Robert Musil's novella Grigia published in 1924. The protagonist's name, Homo, is read as an indicator of his unwillingness to recognize cultural heterogeneity, especially diachronic interculturality and, at the same time, as a critique of the hegemonic universalism which was wide-spread in Western Europe and in Robert Musil's Kakanien and Post-World-War-One Austria. Homo's disrespect for the plurality of time and cultures leads to his end, by which the novella reveals the questionability of exploitative capitalism, colonial reason, hegemonic masculinity, and exact sciences such as Geology. At the same time, the factuality of the manyfold world, of diverse and untamable cultural and temporal ways of being, becomes evident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]