By: Celine Aenlle-Rocha,
on 9/18/2016
At the home of the world’s most authoritative dictionary, perhaps it is not inappropriate to play a word association game. If I say the word ‘modern’, what comes into your mind? The chances are, it will be some variation of ‘new’, ‘recent’, or ‘contemporary’.
The post The old age of the world appeared first on OUPblog.
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By: Leslie Wilson,
on 1/6/2011
Over Christmas I’ve been reading Thomas Mann’s ‘Royal Highness’ (first published 1909)– which is published in the UK by Vintage. It’s rather different from the rest of Mann’s work – though he actually wrote it about the role of the artist in society – an early-twentieth-century conception of the artist which saw him/her as a being essentially set apart from everyday life – it’s a Ruritanian romance – impoverished grand-ducal prince falls in love with American millionaire’s daughter and finally marries her. Though themes of madness, disease, a crazy dog, an insane countess, and a rose that smells of decay run through the novel, its subject-matter is an up-market treatment of one of the penny-novelette themes of the time.
Re-reading it for the first time since university – and for the first time since I became a published author – I found it hard work. Granted, I find ‘The Magic Mountain’ hard work, but that is for different reasons. There are many touches of humour and wonderful writing that show that the novel is really written by the Thomas Mann who wrote the wonderful ‘Buddenbrooks’ but my judgement, after reading it was that a novel of 381 pages (this comment, as Amazon likes to say about customer reviews, refers to the German version, the length of the English one may be different) has about as much proper, publishable material as a novella. It should have been cut, cut, cut.
Now Thomas Mann’s work is not where you would expect to find brief, punchy writing, but whereas his other works are meaty, and all those pages are stuffed full of intelligent and and thought-provoking subject-matter, I found this one sadly repetitious and full of empty narrative spaces. He spends far too much time describing domestic interiors, for example – I kept thinking I was reading World of Interiors magazine and wondering where the photographs would come. (They’d be taken by Fritz von der Schulenburg of course.)
Mann famously (well, famously in Germany) refused to cut ‘Buddenbrooks’, and I think there he was right. I wouldn’t miss a word of that wonderful novel. But he should have cut ‘Royal Highness’. Mind, the early twentieth-century critics had different reasons for greeting it with less than enthusiasm: the ‘Happy End’ and the operetta-atmosphere of the whole thing. ‘A descent into the flat land of optimism,’ one critic called it, while another remarked that ‘German novels should end tragically, in downfall, in the twilight of the Gods.’ (The history of the next thirty-six years provided plenty of material for such literature, but I won’t go there now.)
Of course novels were much longer in the past, and that it’s wrong to apply modern-day criteria to them – but I do honestly think that ‘Royal Highness’ has survived hostile crits, is in the canon, still published even – and translated into I dunnamany languages – just because it’s been buoyed up by the author’s other work. And of course because it provides material for students of German literature to chomp.
My question is: does it matter? Does it matter if some ordinary person picks up this slightly flabby novel and thinks this has to be good writing, because everyone respects it, because the rest of Mann’s work is brilliant? Clearly it doesn’t matter to the publishers. They can sell it. If they couldn’t, it’d be for the scrap-heap licketty-split. We all know THAT.
But that’s my question for the New Year: is a work of fiction good if the public has been persuaded it is, or is there such a thing as intrinsic literary merit?
By: Sally Murphy,
on 3/20/2010
This week's quote of the week is brief - but it should make you think. A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. (Thomas Mann ) People often say 'I wish I could write', presuming it is something that comes naturally. They don't see that writing and getting published is the result of a little bit of talent, and a whole lot of hard work - writing,
Posted on 4/11/2008
Sixty Years of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus by Ulrich Grothus (via the a reader's words blog):
As the subtitle says, Doktor Faustus is The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Leverkühn is born in 1885 in central Germany. He studies the piano and some composition as a boy but first earns a degree in theology before returning to his German-American music teacher Wendell Kretzschmar to study composition in Leipzig. The very day Leverkühn arrives in Leipzig he is led to a brothel by a tour guide and first meets a prostitute whom he later revisits. She will then infect him with syphilis. The infection is interpreted as a stimulant to artistic creativity - and as a silent pact with the devil who makes his appearance exactly half-way through the novel, probably only in Leverkühn’s fantasy. The primary infection is not adequately treated and 24 years later, in 1930, will lead to Leverkühn’s mental breakdown and paralysis, from which he will not recover until his death ten years later. The paralytic shock happens when Leverkühn has invited his friends from Munich to the nearby village where he lives, apparently for a presentation of his last composition The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus, but in fact to confess his nefarious trade of love and warmth for artistic creativity.Add a Comment
By: Jessamyn West,
on 1/21/2007
I read a lot of blogs, but I don’t always follow through and read their links. I appreciate it when people whose opinions I trust can summarize long things for me. Sometimes I sumarize those things for other people. Tonight I am reading the twenty-four page report More on What is Going on at the Library of Congress prepared for AFSCME 2910 by Thomas Mann. You can find it linked off of this page, if you really like reading these sorts of things.
He makes a lot of interesting points that other scholarly types have been trying to make in more clunky fashion for quite some time. In short, libraries that still exist for the purpose of furthering scholarship are having a harder time doing it, both because of the shift towards electronic reources and the “it’s all on Google” mentality but also because our own institutions (LoC I am looking in your direction) seem to want to actively dismantle some of the better tools we have for organizing and accessing knowledge. I’m just pulling out a small part of this, but really you should go read the whole thing. Some peopel might take umbrage, but one of my favorite things about this particular presentation of the issues is that Mann really seems to have a well-researched opinion that he wants to get across without insulting anyone, having a hissyfit, or saying that other people are losers or idiots. It’s clear that he has a take on things, one that others would disagree with, but he lets his metaphors and ideas speak for themselves, even as he’s responding to people who I assume were disagreeing with his last paper on the subject.
cataloging, loc, thomas mannThe Continuing Need for Reference Librarians
What catalogs and portals cannot do, however, what classified bookstacks cannot do, what Internet search engines cannot do, what federated searching cannot do–these things can be done by reference librarians who, far beyond the capacity of any “under the hood programming,” are able to provide researchers with expert guidance on the full range of options available to them for their particular topics, in an intelligent sequence of use, with the best search options and sources segregated from thousands of blind alleys, dead ends, and mountains of unwanted irrelevancies.
Reference work, in other words, is not just a nice “add on” optional service; in its dual function of providing point-of-use instruction and overview classes it is integral to the efficient use of research libraries and to the promotion of scholarship in general. It cannot be replaced by “under the hood” programming improvements in library catalogs or portals, especially when such programming dumbs down multiple complex systems to a lowest common denominator of keyword searching–and also fails to search the vast arrays of resources that are not digitized at all.
Phew, well that's a big question, Leslie! :) Not sure if it is one that can ever be answered to satisfaction, either. There are fashions, of course, in literature. Plenty of authors who were considered good a hundred years ago are no longer so considered. When you compare Jane Austen to Maria Edgeworth, you can see why Austen has survived to be so well loved, and Edgeworth is hardly read except by specialists. Austen is just much more of our time. What's the answer? I dunno...
James Wood in "How Fiction Works" began to persuade me that there is such a thing as intrinsic merit. His is a very conservative position, but nevertheless, the book is a very rewarding read.
C.S.Lewis's position, in 'An Experiment in Criticism', was that since literary judgements are so subjective, we should use as a criterion 'how the work is read'. In other words, if a book can stand multiple re-reading, if even one reader 'would notice and complain' if a chapter was altered or cut, then - since who is to say if F. R. Leavis's opinion is worth more than mine or yours - we have no option but to agree that the work may be good.
He was being provocative, of course, but I've always thought it's a nice democratic idea and he may have had something there.
Leslie~
The book that popped into my mind from your question about literary merit is The Shack. I did not like that book even though people raved about it. Seems to me the public accepted that book because it was the popular thing to do. I received two copies from two friends and cringed all the way through. I didn't want to finish it but I did finish it so I could give my friends an honest book report. Ha! I'm not a literary whiz so maybe it did have merit ~ but not to me.
~ Amy Arnaz
'Austen is just much more of our time' - that's absolutely the point! If something has literary merit it endures because it has something relevant to *all* times. I don't think being popular in one short time span is enough, but if people still want to read it and get a lot from it years later (when it may in some ways be out of fashion) it has literary merit. So it's tested over time.
It doesn't need lots of people to like it immediately, but it needs to contain sufficient universal truths about the human condition to speak to more than a contemporary and socially similar audience.
Are we allowed to say that Mann was usually clothed but sometimes (perhaps in this case - I haven't read this book) naked?
well, yes, and today when I was at lunch with some other authors one of them talked about the difficulty of writing your best book first, citing 'Catch 22'.
'Buddenbrooks' wasn't Thomas Mann's absolute first, he'd written novellas and short stories, but it was his first novel and it was the kind of book that most people write to crown a lifetime's striving. A pretty hard act to follow. And he himself realised that his first novel, if not his best, was undoubtedly his most popular in Germany - that is also a hard thing to cope with. Also, 'Buddenbrooks' was heavily based on family history 'I recorded,' he said. 'I didn't compose.' So maybe he was struggling with the work of composing and imagining from scratch - a challenge he rose to later. That's my theory, and I think I shall stick to it! Unless something else comes up that convinces me otherwise, of course.