Male And Female An Approach To Thomas Mann S Dialectic

Traditional interpretations of Thomas Mann's relation to Nietzsche's writings plot out a simple relation of earlier adulation and later rejection. The book argues that Mann's disavowal of Nietzsche's influence was, in the words of T.J. Reed, a necessary political act when the repudiation of Nietzsche's more hysterical doctrines required such a response. Using a genealogical method, the book traces how Mann labors ambivalently under the shadow of Nietzsche's writings on his own political artistry through a detailed analysis of Mann's Death in Venice, Dr. Faustus, the Joseph tetralogy, and Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. Using the recurring Nietzschean themes of eroticism, death, music, and laughter as a guide, it arrives at a rough picture of how Mann both takes up and discontinues Nietzsche's poetic heritage. The book derives the vision of the interrelationships binding these four leitmotiv elements from Dürer's magic square as depicted in Melancholia I. The link with Dürer is far from arbitrary because Mann directly aligned Nietzschean insight with Dürer's world of passion, sympathy with suffering, the macabre stench of rotting flesh, and Faustian melancholy.

Study of the critical reception of one of the most famous and widely read works of modern literature. Thomas Mann's 1912 novella Death in Venice is one of the most famous and widely read texts in all of modern literature, raising such issues as beauty and decadence, eros and irony, and aesthetics and morality. The amount and variety of criticism on the work is enormous, and ranges from psychoanalytic criticism and readings inspired by Mann's own homosexuality to inquiries into the place of the novella in Mann's oeuvre, its structure and style, and its symbolism and politics. Critics have also drawn connections between the novella and works of Plato, Euripides, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Platen, Wagner, Nietzsche, Gide, and Conrad. Ellis Shookman surveys the reception of Deathin Venice, analyzing several hundred books, articles, and other reactions to the novella, proceeding in a chronological manner that allows a historical perspective. Critics cited include Heinrich Mann, Hermann Broch, D. H. Lawrence, Karl Kraus, Kenneth Burke, Georg Lukàcs, Wolfgang Koeppen, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Thomas Mann himself. Particular attention is paid to Luchino Visconti's film, Benjamin Britten's opera, and to other more recent creative adaptations, both in Germany and throughout the world. Ellis Shookman is associate professor of German at Dartmouth College.

Ever since its appearance in 1947, Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus has generated heated reactions among critics. Whereas initial ideological differences stemming from the Cold War and the division of Germany have abated following the reunification of 1990, diverse opinions and controversies persist about Mann's daring treatment of the Faust theme. These include such topics as the political stance of the author and the historical dimensions of the novel; the biographical and autobiographical and backgrounds of the workespecially in light of the subsequent publication of Mann's diaries and private notebooks; the writer's sexual and psychological proclivities; the thorny issues of montage, collage, and intertextuality; musical concerns such as the extent to which the novel's protagonist appropriates as his own Arnold Schonberg's twelve-tone system of composition or the role of Mann's fellow exile and mentor, Theodor W. Adorno, in indoctrinating his "pupil" into avant-garde musical techniques; the degree to which the novel exhibits structural features of the music on which the narrative focuses; and the function of certain mythic prototypes for this modern parody in fashioning the fortunes and fate of Adrian Leverkuhn. A provocative and still unresolved question centers on the precise role played by Goethe's Faust in the conception and execution of Doctor Faustus, in spite of Mann's assertion that his version of the legend had "nothing in common" with the work of his famous predecessor. Finally, the presence of strong visual elements in the novel leads to an assessment of the critical reception accorded Franz Seitz's film adaptation of Doctor Faustus (1982), a dicey subject in Manncircles, since few filmed versions of his novellas or novels have enjoyed an unsullied reputation.

Lee establishes what is actually happening in the novel in its historical setting, showing Mann's view of how the acceptance of fascism occurred and the determining role he attributed to the academic community in bringing about the disaster. Her book will be of interest to both amateur and professional students of Mann, particularly because it points to rich new directions for study."--BOOK JACKET.

Modernism and Masculinity argues that a crisis of masculinity among European writers and artists played a key role in the modernist revolution. Gerald Izenberg revises the notion that the feminine provided a premodern refuge for artists critical of individualism and materialism. Industrialization and the growing power of the market inspired novelist Thomas Mann, playwright Frank Wedelind, and painter Wassily Kandinsky to feel the problematic character of their own masculinity. As a result, these artists each came to identify creativity, transcendence, and freedom with the feminine. But their critique of masculinity created enormous challenges: How could they appropriate a feminine aesthetic while retaining their own masculine idenitites? How did appropiating the feminine affect their personal relationships or their political views? Modernism and Masculinity seeks to answer these questions. In this absorbing combination of biography and formal critique, Izenberg reconsiders the works of Mann, Wedekind, Kandinsky and semonstrates how the cirses of masculinity they endure are found not just within the images and forms of their art, but in the distinct and very personal impulses that inspired it.

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.