Thomas Mann and Shakespeare : Something Rich and Strange

Abstract

Doring, Tobias, and Ewan Fernie, eds. Thomas and Shakespeare: Something Rich and Strange. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. 280pp. $120.00 (hardcover).Although Thomas was steeped in tradition of Goethe, schiller, Romantics and schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche, he was also indebted a wide range of non-German authors. Toward beginning of his career he was anxious disassociate Buddenbrooks from provincial tradition of Heimatliteratur while stressing its affinities with scandinavian and Russian literatures; and toward end of his life he read and reread works of Joseph Conrad with great enthusiasm. plays a relatively minor role in his pantheon of favorite writers, but readers of Doktor Faustus will recall that one of Leverkuhn's early compositions is inspired by Love's Labour's Lost, and confesses in Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus that he read frank Harris's The Man Shakespeare (1909) while working on novel. Given crucial role model that provided writers of Sturm und Drang generation in their effort establish an authentically German alternative Francophone Neoclassicism, and subsequent incorporation of schlegel-Tieck translation into literary canon, this new anthology of essays devoted relations between cosmopolitan Thomas Mann, and shakespeare-an English-language author of world literature with a special place in literary history-is most welcome.Readers expecting a traditional influence study will be disappointed. We learn relatively little about basic facts: when did first read shakespeare? How often did he see his works performed? Which translations did he read? Did his relationship change while living for two decades in Anglophone America? To be sure, Tobias Doring provides a brief overview of shakespeare's importance in Germany and his place in Mann's work, and Friedhelm Marx includes striking photographs of actors who played Othello in performances that Mann could have seen, or actually saw (113), but primary focus of volume is on thematic parallels rather than direct influence. Elisabeth Bronfen coins term crossmapping to underscore double move at work in conversation between and which this volume enables (246). Ewan Femie expresses a similar idea when he claims that the main purpose of this book is its reciprocal illumination of and shakespeare in a way that defies the increasingly walled-in specialism of literary topics and periodization and suggests the scope for more adventurous conjunctions (11-12). We move, in other words, from objectively verifiable facts critical speculation and subjective impressions.Regarding latter: several of contributors Thomas and Shakespeare explore what David Fuller describes as modes of criticism based on idea of art as emotional knowledge (207). He compares Hans Castorp's deeply felt descriptions of gramophone recordings his own memories of affecting Shakespeare performances. The author Ulrike Draesner uses her adolescent reading of a sex scene in Felix Krull as a springboard describing her creative translations of Shakespeare's sonnets. Heather Love offers an excellent analysis of ways in which Willa Cather and Susan Sontag identified with Shakespeare and in their efforts escape their constricting surroundings. …