This essay attempts to examine the intertextuality of the fictional character Quasimodo in Thomas Mann’s
. Thomas Mann readily professes his affection for his fictional character Adrian, and admits ...to the existence of a close yet secret connection between Adrian and Mann himself. It can be concluded that Thomas Mann identifies not only with Adrian but also with Quasimodo, who himself loves Esmeralda. But why does he identify thus? There is no simple answer to this question, and here lies the secret of Thomas Mann’s way of working. To explain this, the present essay takes a slight detour and traces his way of thinking and working. This is referred to in this essay as the ‘second concealment,’ which logically presupposes knowledge of the ‘first concealment.’ In the course of this detour, we gain some insight into why Thomas Mann appears in
riding on the back of Quasimodo.
Aware of the act of writing as a temporal process, many modernist authors preserved numerous manuscripts of their works, which themselves thematized time. Textual Awareness analyzes the writing ...processes in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, and Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus and relates these to Anglo-American, French, and German theories of text. By relating theory to practice, this comparative study reveals the links between literary and textual criticism.
A key issue in both textual criticism and the so-called crisis of the novel is the tension between the finished and the unfinished. After a theoretical examination of the relationship between genetic and textual criticism, Dirk Van Hulle uses the three case studies to show how?at each stage in the writing process?the text still had the potential of becoming something entirely different; how and why these geneses proceeded the way they did; how Joyce, Proust, and Mann allowed contingencies to shape their work; how these authors recycled the words of their critics in order to inoculate their works against them; how they shaped an intertextual dimension through the processing of source texts and reading notes; and how text continually generated more text.
Van Hulle's exploration of process sheds new light on the remarkable fact that so many modernist authors protected their manuscripts, implying both the authors' urge to grasp everything and their awareness of the dangers of their encyclopedic projects. Textual Awareness offers new insights into the artificiality of the artifact?the novel?that are relevant to the study of literary modernism in general and the study of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann in particular.
Dirk Van Hulle is Assistant Professor of English and German Literature, University of Antwerp.
The thesis of A Gorgon's mask: The Mother in Thomas Mann's Fiction depends upon three psychoanalytic concepts: Freud's early work on the relationship between the infant and its mother and on the ...psychology of artistic creation, Annie Reich's analysis of the grotesque-comic sublimation, and Edmund Bergler's analysis of writer's block. Mann's crisis of sexual anxiety in late adolescence is presented as the defining moment for his entire artistic life. In the throes of that crisis he included a sketch of a female as Gorgon in a book that would not escape his mother's notice. But to defend himself from being overcome by the Gorgon-mother's stare he employed the grotesque-comic sublimation, hiding the mother figure behind fictional characters physically attractive but psychologically repellent, all the while couching his fiction in an ironic tone that evoked humor, however lacking in humor the subtext might be. In this manner he could deny to himself that the mother figure always lurked in his work, and by that denial deny that he was a victim of oral regression. For, as Edmund Bergler argues, the creative writer who acknowledges his oral dependency will inevitably succumb to writer's block. Mann's late work reveals that his defense against the Gorgon is crumbling. In Doctor Faustus Mann portrays Adrian Leverkühn as, ultimately, the victim of oral regression; but the fact that Mann was able to compete the novel, despite severe physical illness and psychological distress, demonstrates that he himself was still holding writer's block at bay. In Confessions of Felix Krull: Confidence Man, a narrative that he had abandoned forty years before, Mann was finally forced to acknowledge that he was depleted of creative vitality, but not of his capacity for irony, brilliantly couching the victorious return of the repressed in ambiguity. This study will be of
interest to general readers who enjoy Mann's narrative art, to students of Mann's work, especially its psychological and mythological aspects, and to students of the psychology of artistic creativity.
Following the definition of ‘practice’ conceptualised in After Virtue, the paper argues that literature as creative writing and reading is a MacIntyrean practice. Literature's key internal goods are ...spelled out: the common aesthetic enjoyment achieved by the writer's ability to create a truthful fictional narrative the reader is drawn into and the expansion of our narrative identities and self‐awareness. Against the conceptual background, the paper asks in which sense can we say that literature as a practice schools us in the virtues. Thomas Mann's work and life are discussed. It argues that Mann's work is both a rich source for us to understand 20th‐century German and European bourgeois societies and an ideological obfuscation of such understanding. Drawing on his early conservatism, the paper shows how the practice of writing and Mann's Nietzschean self‐assertion allowed him to become a politically engaged writer able to question himself and his culture.
An analysis of the novels of Maturin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Mann, Lovecraft and Pelevin through the prism of their interest in investigating the nature of the nightmare reveals the unstudied features of ...the nightmare as a mental state and traces the mosaic of coincidences leading from literary experiments to today's culture of nightmare consumption.
In this study I confront the work of Thomas Mann with the Jewish question in order to examine the relationship between literary (human) agency and the inferior margins that enable it: those creatures ...who do not share the language of (the European and civilized) man. Through a reading of several of Mann’s narratives that concern the relationship between human beings and animals as well as texts by Jewish authors, Kafka in German and Agnon in Hebrew, I seek to shed light on the concept of ‘animality,’ a term that implies continuity between the human and the animal, thereby laying bare man’s political precariousness and fragility and aligning the human with the creature by exposing the body. Based on my reading of Mann’s figuration of the dog in the early story “Tobias Mindernickel” (1898), the novella
(1917), and his Jewish mythical depiction of the biblical Joseph as a dog in
(1933–1943), I argue that Mann’s humanism is limited in that it guards against the mimetic alignment of man with other creatures by portraying the (often muted) creaturely object of the literary depiction as an inferior – albeit frequently admirable – being. By contrasting Mann’s treatment of this question with Jewish literature’s complete immersion in the animal, I suggest how descriptive speech identifies orientalism as a form of descriptive knowledge, thus clarifying as well the process whereby the modern European nation-state was consolidated by its invisible margins. The article thus suggests that literary description is a means to differentiate and gain agency by adhering to language’s elevated and hierarchical terms.
Der Zauberberg ist von der Forschung unter Rückgriff auf einen von Thomas Mann selbst verwendeten Begriff häufig als „Zeitroman” beschrieben worden. Dabei hat oft die Frage nach den historischen und ...literaturgeschichtlichen Zusammenhängen des Texts – als Rückblick auf das Vorkriegseuropa beziehungsweise als Spiegel der klassischen Moderne – im Mittelpunkt gestanden. Der vorliegende Artikel widmet sich der Zeitthematik des Romans aus einem anderen Blickwinkel. Zum einen zeichnet er nach, welche Zeitdiskurse – von Schopenhauer über Nietzsche und Bergson bis Einstein – sowohl auf inhaltlicher als auch auf narrativer Ebene ihren Niederschlag im Zauberberg gefunden haben. Zum anderen illustriert er, wie die poetologische Dimension des Romans in der literaturwissenschaftlichen Theoriebildung der frühen Bundesrepublik (bei Käte Hamburger, Hans Robert Jauß und Günther Müller) teils implizit und teils explizit nachgewirkt hat. Der Artikel zeigt auf, in welchem Umfang Manns literarisches Reflektieren über die schriftstellerischen Möglichkeiten der Zeitdarstellung die Unterscheidung zwischen Erzählzeit und erzählter Zeit antizipiert hat und argumentiert vor diesem Hintergrund für eine Lektüre des Zauberbergs als eines „Zeitromans” in einem breiteren theoriegeschichtlichen Sinn.
...the magic comes crashing down with the outbreak of World War I, which sends Hans Castorp back to the everyday world below and to an almost certain death, along with so many other young men in that ...conflagration. What really drew my attention this time was the often ironic tone of Mann's narrator, whose distance from his characters (not only from Hans Castorp, but from all the other residents of the sanatorium, as well as the two talkative philosophers) gives a comic cast to the tale which undercuts the reader's tendency toward identification or solemnity—this despite the fact that the book deals with some potentially very solemn subjects, such as illness and its relation to genius, the relativity of time and space, the desire for death as a basso continuo of life, not to mention love and war and honor. Is that a sign of democratization (you don't need to have an "elite" education to read The Magic Mountain), or merely of the decline of foreign language study in the English-speaking world, even among the educated?
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