Der Zauberberg in philosophical, psychological and sociological contexts: an intertextual reading of Thomas Mann

<p>Life, death, disease and Eros are themes of universal relevance that have been addressed in works of science, philosophy, literature and art throughout recorded human history. In the early 20th century, the unprecedented scale of human extermination during World War I necessitated the adaptation of old ideas to a new reality. This is manifest in the work of the German author Thomas Mann, whose developing ideas on life, death, disease and Eros are clearly apparent in his novel Der Zauberberg (1913-1924). Der Zauberberg is set at a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium in the years leading up to World War I. The main protagonist, Hans Castorp, arrives at the sanatorium as a visitor and is subsequently diagnosed with tuberculosis. During his sanatorium stay, Castorp comes into contact with three pedagogic figures: Ludovico Settembrini, Leo Naphta and Mynheer Peeperkorn. These men represent various attitudes towards life, death, disease and Eros. The humanist Settembrini, for example, affirms life but is repulsed by Eros, disease and death; the Jesuit ascetic Naphta glorifies erotic suffering and death while denying life, and the coffee magnate Peeperkorn celebrates life and Eros – yet to a pathological extent. My thesis follows the dialogic clash between the views of these pedagogues, as well as their influence on Hans Castorp, and is divided into sections that relate these views to their sociological implications. After examining the nature of death, life and disease within the novel, I relate these to the novel’s portrayal of society. I follow this with an investigation of the connection between death, life, disease and Eros, and conclude by examining these themes within their sociological context in Der Zauberberg. The conceptions of life, death, disease and Eros in Der Zauberberg are largely borrowed, following Thomas Mann’s creative technique of “Montage”, which allowed him to incorporate themes, concepts, paraphrased passages and quotations from other thinkers into his own work. These borrowed ideas create a complexity of textual relationships that corresponds to the theory of intertextuality; accordingly, my thesis examines Thomas Mann’s novel from an intertextual angle. Although Der Zauberberg has been the subject of intensive, source-critical study, the newer field of intertextual theory has largely been ignored, notable exceptions being the analyses of Thomas Mann’s works by Barbara Beßlich, Claudia Gremler, Michael Maar and Franziska Schößler. These scholars have narrowed the original, prohibitively wide scope of intertextual theory to enable intertextual analysis of individual texts. Following their example, I limit my definition of the intertext to philosophy, sociology and psychology, specifically to the works of the philosopher-poet Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), of the philosophers and sociologists Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, and of the psychologist and sociologist Sigmund Freud. My analysis of Der Zauberberg identifies connections to the intertexts within the novel, and examines how clearly these are presented and what form they take. Most importantly, I investigate the heuristic impact of the novel’s intertextuality, that is, how the intertextual relationships in Der Zauberberg influence the reader’s interpretation of both the nature of life, death, disease and Eros, and their effect on culture in the novel.</p>

Der Zauberberg in philosophical, psychological and sociological contexts: an intertextual reading of Thomas Mann

<p>Life, death, disease and Eros are themes of universal relevance that have been addressed in works of science, philosophy, literature and art throughout recorded human history. In the early 20th century, the unprecedented scale of human extermination during World War I necessitated the adaptation of old ideas to a new reality. This is manifest in the work of the German author Thomas Mann, whose developing ideas on life, death, disease and Eros are clearly apparent in his novel Der Zauberberg (1913-1924). Der Zauberberg is set at a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium in the years leading up to World War I. The main protagonist, Hans Castorp, arrives at the sanatorium as a visitor and is subsequently diagnosed with tuberculosis. During his sanatorium stay, Castorp comes into contact with three pedagogic figures: Ludovico Settembrini, Leo Naphta and Mynheer Peeperkorn. These men represent various attitudes towards life, death, disease and Eros. The humanist Settembrini, for example, affirms life but is repulsed by Eros, disease and death; the Jesuit ascetic Naphta glorifies erotic suffering and death while denying life, and the coffee magnate Peeperkorn celebrates life and Eros – yet to a pathological extent. My thesis follows the dialogic clash between the views of these pedagogues, as well as their influence on Hans Castorp, and is divided into sections that relate these views to their sociological implications. After examining the nature of death, life and disease within the novel, I relate these to the novel’s portrayal of society. I follow this with an investigation of the connection between death, life, disease and Eros, and conclude by examining these themes within their sociological context in Der Zauberberg. The conceptions of life, death, disease and Eros in Der Zauberberg are largely borrowed, following Thomas Mann’s creative technique of “Montage”, which allowed him to incorporate themes, concepts, paraphrased passages and quotations from other thinkers into his own work. These borrowed ideas create a complexity of textual relationships that corresponds to the theory of intertextuality; accordingly, my thesis examines Thomas Mann’s novel from an intertextual angle. Although Der Zauberberg has been the subject of intensive, source-critical study, the newer field of intertextual theory has largely been ignored, notable exceptions being the analyses of Thomas Mann’s works by Barbara Beßlich, Claudia Gremler, Michael Maar and Franziska Schößler. These scholars have narrowed the original, prohibitively wide scope of intertextual theory to enable intertextual analysis of individual texts. Following their example, I limit my definition of the intertext to philosophy, sociology and psychology, specifically to the works of the philosopher-poet Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), of the philosophers and sociologists Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, and of the psychologist and sociologist Sigmund Freud. My analysis of Der Zauberberg identifies connections to the intertexts within the novel, and examines how clearly these are presented and what form they take. Most importantly, I investigate the heuristic impact of the novel’s intertextuality, that is, how the intertextual relationships in Der Zauberberg influence the reader’s interpretation of both the nature of life, death, disease and Eros, and their effect on culture in the novel.</p>

The City of Brass and Alexander’s Narrow Grave: Translation and Commentary of Kafas added to Manuscript M7709 (Part 1)

The 17th-century manuscript M7709 (held in the Matenadaran, Yerevan, Armenia) includes an Armenian copy of the History of the City of Brass, to which an unknown scribe has added short poems about Alexander the Great. The first of three articles that together present the Alexander poems of M7709 in full, with English translation, for the first time, this article introduces the manuscript and considers the first six poems: the seduction of Olympias, and Alexander’s encounter with plant-men at the edge of the world. It adds commentary on the poems’ relationship to the corresponding part of the History of the City of Brass on each page, proposing textual reasons why the scribe added the poems where he did. Across the three articles, this commentary delves into textual relationships beyond the pages of M7709, linking the Armenian History of the City of Brass, Alexander Romance and other texts and traditions, to show how this manuscript is situated amid wider networks of circulating literature. As a microhistorical study, it seeks to provide illumination into the macrohistory of medieval and early modern literature in and beyond the Caucasus.

The Role of Value-Semantic Oppositions in Revealing the Deep Literary and Psychological Characteristics of the Narrator’s Image in “Poor Liza” by N.M. Karamzin

Value-semantic oppositions in the novel by N.M. Karamzin, seen as meaningful text dominants in situations of "existential fullness", are discussed in the article from the point of view of an interdisciplinary approach of literary criticism, text theory, psychology and linguistics. The article describes the process of literary and psychological meaning generation, coupled with the narrator’s inherent properties, as well as implicit literary and psychological textual relationships with inherent properties, it also singles out the contextual ways of these characteristics, reflecting motives, attitudes, generalized worldview judgments (generalizations). The author shows the dialog nature of the narrator’s literary and psychological attitude to the realities denoted by various parts of the opposition in the situation of “existential fullness”. The role of lexical markers corresponding to the depicted integral emotional state of the narrator in the privision of active reader's attention and attracting him to the deep literary and psychological characteristics is revealed.

Encounters at Manuscript Preparation: Inquiry in Conflict’s Aftermath

This exercise of the researcher self explores relationships materializing in manuscript preparation, suggests that conflict-site research is more of a social and affective experience, from proposal to manuscript preparation, than most researchers realize. Outside of clinical and ameliorative approaches, little educational research focuses on ongoing, unresolved conflict. Even less sheds light on the experience of the conflict-site researcher. Here, I show how texts of other conflict-site writers accompanied my process of manuscript preparation, just as activist teachers I observed during the field work phase stood among peers when protesting and facing police repression. Correspondingly, I discuss an intertextual approach of reaching out to others and drawing on published stories while composing the main narrative of my manuscript, Movements on the streets and in schools. I call this practice conrading based on my turning to Anna Tsing and W. G. Sebald who had turned to the stories of Joseph Conrad in their books. As I called upon other authors who wrote about conflict in my assembling a social movement-based manuscript, moving forward, I suggest the uptake of social and textual relationships will become important when researching in times and spaces of pandemic, state repression and institutional defunding.

Textual Coherence in Adnan AL-Sayegh’s Poetic Experience

The research is a study of the concept of textual cohesion, through the poetry of Adnan Al-Sayegh, based on the discovery of the concepts of textual cohesion and its mechanisms through studying the relationship of cohesion to the objective unity in modern poetry and the concept of text and text. The research has stopped at the most important. Concepts of textual coherence such as consistency, referral, comparison, substitution and etc. Certain texts from Adnan Al-Sayegh's poetry have been chosen as analytical models, the analysis of which reveals the jeweler's methods of imparting textual coherence to his texts, in an attempt to research is to study the entire text without stopping at the research parts, because this is a real application of the idea of textual coherence, which is based on a study of the structure of the text in total by assuming textual relationships as a basic engine for the structure of the text by revealing the totality of the linguistic relationships that govern the structure of the text and govern it.

Hrómundur in prose and verse: On the relationships between four versions of the story of Hrómundur Greipsson

The present study examines the transmission history of the story of Hrómundur Gr(e)ipsson in Icelandic. Its focus lies in the investigation of textual relationships between four works dealing with the story of Hrómundur: two in metric from, Griplur and Hrómundar rímur Greipssonar (RHG), and two in prose, the seventeenth-century saga (17HsG) and the younger, hitherto unknown saga, possibly originating in the nineteenth-century (19HsG). The study concludes that the saga-writer of 19HsG most likely utilised both Griplur and the older saga to create a coherent story of Hrómundur. Alternatively, they based their adaptation on a now lost intermediate version of the story that already merged the accounts of the rímur and the saga, as elements from both older adaptations can be found in the younger saga. Furthermore, the study concludes that the younger set of rímur (RHG) are derived from the printed edition of the seventeenth-century saga, as the editorial error of C.C. Rask, the saga’s editor, appears in the poem.

Speculative Bibliography

This article proposes speculative bibliography as an experimental approach to the digitised archive, in which textual associations are constituted propositionally, iteratively, and (sometimes) temporarily, as the result of probabilistic computational models. Speculative bibliography is offered as a complement to digital scholarly editing, and as a direct response to the challenges of scale and labour that will make comprehensive editing of digital archives impossible. Rather than acting on specific, individual texts, a speculative bibliography enacts a scholarly theory of the text through a computational model, reorganising the archive to evidence a particular idea of textual relation or interaction. Such models, in which textual relationships are determined by formal, internal textual structures, constitute bibliographic arguments that can be verified, amended, extended, or contested on either humanistic or computational grounds.