Robert Musil and Thomas Bernhard offer two of the most provocative critiques of the relationship between narration and the construction of subjectivity in all of twentieth-century literature. The first half of the seminar will be devoted to a reading of Musil’s The Man without Qualities, the second to a series of novels from the first half of Bernhard’s career: Frost, Gargoyles, The Lime Works, and Correction. The primary focus of the course will be a comparative critique of the practice of narrativity and the construction of subjectivity in these texts; in the seminar’s second half we will also focus on Bernhard as a reader of Musil.