Death in Venice
#Germany #20thcentury #novel #primary
Thomas Mann. Death in Venice. (1912, Germany)
Read this first as a teaching assistant a few years ago for a sexuality and literature course.
Thomas Mann. Death in Venice. (1912, Germany)
Read this first as a teaching assistant a few years ago for a sexuality and literature course.
Place on List:
II. Literary Genre: The
Novel
2.
How does a novel represent the individual's internal struggle?
Thomas
Mann. Death
in Venice.
(1912, Germany)
Supporting References:
- See youtube videos
- "Death in Venice." Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase & Fable. Eds. Ayto, John, and Ian Crofton. : Chambers Harrap Publishers, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2011. Date Accessed 26 Aug. 2013
“Death in Venice.
A novella, originally Der Tod in Venedig (1912), by
the German novelist Thomas Mann (1875–1955), which was published in
Britain in 1928. It is a study, overlaid with symbolism, of the fatal
attraction of an ailing and ageing writer, Gustav von Aschenbach, for
a beautiful 13-year-old boy, Tadzio. He remains in Venice even in the
face of a cholera epidemic, in which he dies. In the notable film
version (1971) von Aschenbach, sensitively played by Dirk Bogarde, is
reimagined as a composer. The latter is transparently based on Gustav
Mahler, and the moving Adagietto from his fifth
symphony (1901) accompanies the slow evolution of the story. Tadzio
was played by the young Swedish actor Björn Andresen (b.1955), and
the boy's mother by Silvana Mangano. See also First
lines of novels.”
- Birch, Dinah. "Mann, Thomas." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 16 Aug. 2013
The article offers
an overview of Mann and less a discussion on the above-cited
text.
“Mann,
Thomas (1875–1955) German novelist and essayist. Born
in Lübeck, he emigrated from Nazi Germany, settled in America, and
became a US citizen in 1944. He returned to Europe in 1952, settling
in Switzerland. Buddenbrooks, a novel on the theme of the
decay of a family, with strongly autobiographical features, appeared
in 1901 and quickly made him famous. Tonio Kröger (1903),
one of his most celebrated novellas, is, like so many of his works,
about the nature of the artist. Der Tod in Venedig (1912:
Death in Venice) presents the artist and artistic creation
with the pervasive irony characteristic of much of his work and was
the basis of an acclaimed film by Luchino Visconti (1971) starring
Dirk Bogarde. Originally a man of rather conservative sympathies, as
expressed in Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918:
Observations of an Unpolitical Man), he caused surprise by
quickly lending public support to the Weimar Republic. Der
Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) appeared in 1924, the
‘Joseph’ novels (in four parts) in 1933–43, during which time
he also published his novel Lotte in Weimar, based on a
brief episode in the life of Goethe.
As a Nobel
Prize-winner (1929) he enjoyed immense prestige
in America, and his recorded wartime speeches were broadcast to
Germany by the BBC. Constantly concerned with the character and role
of the artist, particularly in what Mann saw as his culpable, even
criminal, relation to society, he linked this theme with the problem
of Nazism in Dr Faustus (1947). His last full-length novel
derived from the picaresque
tradition: Die Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull
(1954: The Confessions of the Confidence Trickster Felix Krull).”
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