Blanc, Jacob (2019) Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil, Duke University Press (Durham, NC and London), xvi + 296 pp. $104.95 hbk. $27.95 pbk.
Thomas Pfau (Duke University) explores the radical transformation of the Bildungsroman - and of the image ( Bild ) as its narrative, speculative fuel - in ‘The Magic Mountain’. Contrasting Mann's narrative process with that of Goethe and Hegel, and drawing on the sociological writings of Georg Simmel and Arnold Gehlen, Pfau reads Mann's novel as decisively breaking with Romanticism's self-generating, organicist, and teleological conception of cultural narrative.