Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain

This seminar offers an in-depth exploration of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924). The novel invites the reader to multiple trajectories of reading: As a modernist epic, The Magic Mountain intimates the tradition of the Bildungsroman, only with an ironic twist. It draws an unforgettable portrayal of a lost world, the cosmopolitan European society before the First World War. The polyglot, international milieu of a sanatorium functions as the catalyst of the sensual as well as the philosophical “Bildung” of the young hero. While The Magic Mountain presents a narrative of desire, entailing hidden sexualities and ambiguous gender construction, it incorporates into its universe diverse reflections on new scientific and pseudo-scientific paradigms, ranging from the discovery of X-rays, Freud, and cell biology to the occult. Mann’s musings on the concept of time, inspired by Einstein’s theory of relativity and Bergson’s philosophy of time, constitute a major tenet of this encyclopedic novel. We will also address Mann’s indebtedness to the German Romantic legacy, and his political views on the cataclysmic transformations, brought about by the First World War. References to Fr. Schlegel, Nietzsche, and Adorno will provide the philosophical background.

First week assignment:
Thomas Mann, Assignment for Week 1 (T, March 18)
The Magic Mountain (MM) (1924), Foreword; Chapters 1-3 (pp 3-90): 87 pages

(Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Translated from the German by John E. Woods. 1996; NY: Vintage. (Page numbers for the seminar follow the Woods translation)
Available at the Literary Arts Bookstore
Available as audiobook, narrated by David Rintoul
Kindle edition, follows the translation of Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter
Translated from the German by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter. 1969; NY: Vintage.)

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