Doktor Faustus and its Variations on Lateness
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Cecily Cai
Abstract
Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus, first published 1947, tells the story of a fictional German musician, Adrian Leverkühn, paralleled with the rise and fall of Germany in the first half of the 20th century. In fact, the idea of Doktor Faustus predated Mann’s exile, and it had been already conceived as a work of lateness – a Faust, a Parsifal in prose. In the process of creating variations on lateness, Mann referred to the musical models of Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, and the music criticism of Theodor W. Adorno. As a product of Mann’s exile in Southern California, Doktor Faustus connects the concept of lateness with his experience of exile through music, as Edward Said would later point out in his reflections on “late style.” By engaging with pre-existing compositions and criticism, I will present Doktor Faustus as a novelistic rendering of musical lateness that not only engages with compositions such as Wagner’s Parsifal and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony but also sheds new light on the interpretation of lateness as an artistic and – above all – human experience.
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Contributions
- Eigentum und Metapher: Überlegungen zu Franz Kafkas „Der Bau“
- Beyond Thought’s Limits: Celan, Heidegger, and the Crooked Path of Art
- Szene im Kirschgarten: Zu einem Gedicht von Paul Celan, mit einem methodologischen Exkurs
- Doktor Faustus and its Variations on Lateness
- An Aesthete in Despair: Reading Lolita through Kierkegaard’s Aesthetic Sphere of Existence
- When Translation Reshapes Reception: The Curious Case of Zeruya Shalev in the German Literary Sphere of World Literature
- Reviews
- Marc Redfield: Shibboleth. Judges, Derrida, Celan. New York, NJ: Fordham UP, 2020. 176 S.
- Dominik Finkelde: Logiken der Inexistenz: Figurationen des Realen im Zeitalter der Immanenz. Deutsche Erstausgabe. Wien: Passagen Verlag, 2019. 170 pp.
- Donatien Grau, Hg.: Pierre Guyotat, Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2022. 280 S.
- Rochelle Tobias: Pseudo-Memoirs: Life and Its Imitation in Modern Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021. 208 pp.
- Agnes Hoffmann: Landschaft im Nachbild: Imaginationen von Natur in der Literatur um 1900 bei Henry James und Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Baden-Baden: Rombach Wissenschaft, 2020. 356 pp.
- Hua Li: Chinese Science Fiction During the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2021. 248 pp.
- Varja Balžalorsky Antić: The Lyric Subject. A Reconceptualization. Übers. Erica und Lukas Debeljak. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2022. 310 Seiten.
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Contributions
- Eigentum und Metapher: Überlegungen zu Franz Kafkas „Der Bau“
- Beyond Thought’s Limits: Celan, Heidegger, and the Crooked Path of Art
- Szene im Kirschgarten: Zu einem Gedicht von Paul Celan, mit einem methodologischen Exkurs
- Doktor Faustus and its Variations on Lateness
- An Aesthete in Despair: Reading Lolita through Kierkegaard’s Aesthetic Sphere of Existence
- When Translation Reshapes Reception: The Curious Case of Zeruya Shalev in the German Literary Sphere of World Literature
- Reviews
- Marc Redfield: Shibboleth. Judges, Derrida, Celan. New York, NJ: Fordham UP, 2020. 176 S.
- Dominik Finkelde: Logiken der Inexistenz: Figurationen des Realen im Zeitalter der Immanenz. Deutsche Erstausgabe. Wien: Passagen Verlag, 2019. 170 pp.
- Donatien Grau, Hg.: Pierre Guyotat, Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2022. 280 S.
- Rochelle Tobias: Pseudo-Memoirs: Life and Its Imitation in Modern Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021. 208 pp.
- Agnes Hoffmann: Landschaft im Nachbild: Imaginationen von Natur in der Literatur um 1900 bei Henry James und Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Baden-Baden: Rombach Wissenschaft, 2020. 356 pp.
- Hua Li: Chinese Science Fiction During the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2021. 248 pp.
- Varja Balžalorsky Antić: The Lyric Subject. A Reconceptualization. Übers. Erica und Lukas Debeljak. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2022. 310 Seiten.
