Introduction

What constitutes tradition? How do we think about other traditions? What is "alterity"? Mann and Germany; American readers and Mann's Germany. Reception theory.

MM: chapters 1,2,3; Bloom "Introduction"; Sontag, "Pilgrimage"

Bildungsroman; Bildung; Enlightenment, romanticism, myth, reason. What is irony?

MM: chapter 4. Campbell, "Erotic Irony..."; Reed, "Uses of Tradition"

Perspectives on education; Settembrini and Naphta; Mann and the "crisis" of modernity.

MM: chapter 5;; Bauer, "The Magician"; Heller, "Conversations on the Magic Mountain"; Lukacs, "In Search of Bourgeois Man".

Politics, Morality, and Ethics in Litearture; Mann as an intellectual in the public sphere. Irony, again. Protest literature or conservatism? Is Mann's irony self-serving or a legitimate ethical response to the world?

MM: chapter 6; Barnouw, "Placet Experiri?..."; Burke, "Thomas Mann and Andre Gide."

Mann and romanticism; his relation to a tradition of thought, especially Nietzsche. Mann as a reader of tradition. Irony and tradition.

MM: chapter 7; Corngold, "Mann as a Reader of Nietzsche"; Nehamas, "Nietzsche in the Magic Mountain."

Critiques of modernity; alienation and irony; the neo-Marxist tradition. Adorno, "Toward a Portrait of Thomas Mann"; Lukacs, "Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann?"

Presentations

Presentations

Presentations