A lived myth: Thomas Mann's aesthetic German mythos

This project centers on the work of Thomas Mann and a reading of his overall corpus as a reworking of the mythos that he revived and refashioned from his forbearers. Through his poesy, Mann captures the Zeitgeist of his homeland and plunges deeply into its abyssal situation to write the tragic fate of an epoch and a nation that cannot be adequately captured except through the lens of one both enmeshed-within and standing-outside of his age.;It builds upon a notion articulated late in Mann's career in his essay "Freud and the Future," which connects the artistic and the mythical and places the artist in the dichotomous position between what he describes as infantilism and maturity. When the artist is brought to recognition of the mythical, primitive stage of the aesthetic-moment, there is gained an insight into the eternal that exceeds human finitude. In a move mirroring the romantics, Mann shows the artist, therefore, remaining in tension between these states. In articulating the uniquely German mythos of the twentieth century, Mann shows the irreconcilable tension between the tranquil and the daemonic that he describes in the late lecture "Germany and the Germans" as the tragic-triumph of German inwardness born of its Romantic roots that, like Faust, simultaneously blesses and damns them.;This project departs from other readings of Mann's career by seeking to found continuity from beginning to end. While it cannot be denied that his political stance undergoes significant changes over the course of his long career, and certainly his writing matures and transforms in style and content, this work argues that one must trace the origins of that mythical sense that pervades his late works to the underlying essence, a mythos , on which even his earliest writings are grounded.