The United States of Europe

This dissertation is a comparative study of literary Europeanism in the late-Habsburg Empire. The biographies and aesthetic projects of Robert Musil, Italo Svevo and James Joyce are deeply embedded in the multinational fabric of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and their novels become part of what might be defined as a ―transnational Habsburg literary canon.‖ Their works create a highly politicized, fictional projection of multicultural Austria–and by extension, of a multicultural Europe–anchored in the polyglot border town Trieste. The primary texts I examine are Musil‘s The Man without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), published between 1930 and 1942, Svevo‘s 1923 novel Zeno’s Conscience (La Coscienza di Zeno), and Joyce‘s Finnegans Wake of 1939. I read these texts against the background of Austrian history and in combination with current theoretical debates on nationalism. I argue that the origins of a cultural and political Europeanism in the Habsburg Empire can be traced back to forms of early modern regional patriotism, which was divorced from national identity and characterized by loyalty to the local traditions of linguistically and culturally heterogeneous territories or cities. The rise of nationalism in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions largely replaced these earlier forms of regional allegiance. I examine the survival of vestigial remnants of this pre-national logic in the literary representations of Trieste, a city at the crossroads of German, Italian and Slovene cultures. The high modernist fiction of Musil, Svevo and Joyce conjures an image of Trieste as a microcosm of the multinational empire and an urban experiment of a future United States of Europe. Their fictional characters not only subscribe to a cultural and political Europeanism, but refuse, through their flexible loyalties and shifting allegiances, to fully commit to the concept of nation.