Doktor Faustus Research Articles

HERESY AND ORTHODOXY: A TEXTUAL VARIANT IN THOMAS MANN'S DOKTOR FAUSTUS

ABSTRACTThis article draws upon a textual variant in Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus, and proceeds to investigate the issue which it raises: the role of heresy in the novel, and the question of whether the heretical in art is more accessible or inaccessible than the orthodox. Heresy and its opposite, the orthodox or the ‘pious’, as Mann normally describes it, are categories of religious thought, used by Mann in a transferred sense to convey the spiritual and intellectual dilemma of the modern artist. Given that Adrian Leverkühn is a composer, and that the reader therefore needs to take Mann's description (through the narrator Zeitblom) of his music ‘on trust’, the thesis of this article is that an understanding of the sources within the Christian heretical tradition upon which Leverkühn draws for his compositions is necessary for the reader's understanding of the nature of his music and its relationship to the artistic tradition which it both acknowledges and rejects. The article also posits the decisive influence upon Doktor Faustus of the treatment of heresy in Dostoevsky's major novels. It concludes by considering a further associated textual detail with regard to the question of salvation.

Radierter Patriotismus

In his late novel Doktor Faustus (1947) – written in exile in the USA during the Second World War – Thomas Mann has the fictional “German composer” Adrian Leverkühn “take back” Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with his last cantata “Dr. Fausti Weheklag”. The humanism of the “Ode to Joy” with its final exultation “Alle Menschen werden Brüder” had been discredited by dictatorship, terror, war and the Holocaust, and by patriotic and nationalistic appropriations by various political systems. In the course of Germany’s coming to terms with its past – the so-called “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” – from the mid-1960s onwards, a number of composers reacted to the scandal of the misuse of this major classical work of art and its liberating message with compositions whose direct reference to Beethoven’s Ninth can also be understood as “retractions” of this symphony. This article investigates different approaches to Beethoven’s controversial work in Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Requiem für einen jungen Dichter (1967–1969), Hans Werner Henze’s Sinfonia N. 9 (1995–1997), Andreas F. Staffel’s Beethoven off set – oder: ich nehme sie zurück die neunte Symphonie (2015–2019) and many other works.

A Second Concealment: Quasimodo in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus

Abstract This essay attempts to examine the intertextuality of the fictional character Quasimodo in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. Thomas Mann readily professes his affection for his fictional character Adrian, and admits to the existence of a close yet secret connection between Adrian and Mann himself. It can be concluded that Thomas Mann identifies not only with Adrian but also with Quasimodo, ­who himself loves Esmeralda. But why does he identify thus? There is no simple answer to this question, and here lies the secret of Thomas Mann’s way of working. To explain this, the present essay takes a slight detour and traces his way of thinking and working. This is referred to in this essay as the ‘second concealment,’ which logically presupposes knowledge of the ‘first concealment.’ In the course of this detour, we gain some insight into why Thomas Mann appears in Doktor Faustus riding on the back of Quasimodo.

Between Good and Evil: Thomas Mann's Nietzsche and the German Reformation

This article explores the spiritual role of Friedrich Nietzsche in Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus. Nietzsche's biographical and intellectual place in the novel has been thoroughly documented in secondary literature, but his moral and spiritual function has received less attention. Specifically, the article identifies Nietzsche as a product of the theological, Christological, and soteriological tradition of the German Reformation. While Nietzsche disowned this tradition entirely, it nonetheless shaped him as a moral and spiritual being. The result is deep ambivalence, placing him 'between good and evil' (Mann's phrase) rather than (in Nietzsche's own famous formulation) 'beyond good and evil'.

Tempting of Speech in Music Education: Reflections on Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus

Tempting of Speech in Music Education: Reflections on Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus

Doktor Faustus and its Variations on Lateness

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.

Two banks of the same river. Thomas Mann and his publishers Samuel Fischer and Gottfried Bermann Fischer

The enduring collaboration between the outstanding German writer and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann and the Frankfurt-based publishing house S. Fischer Verlag started in the late 19th c., with the publication of Mann’s early novella Little Herr Friedemann [Der kleine Herr Friedemann]. The year 1897 marked the start of Mann’s correspondence with Samuel Fischer and then his successor Gottfried Bermann Fischer, which spanned more than fifty years; the committed publisher saw to the publication of such landmarks of 20th-c. German literature as Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks — Verfall einer Familie], The Magic Mountain [Der Zauberberg], Lotte in Weimar , the four installments of Joseph and His Brothers [Joseph und seine Brüder], Doctor Faustus [Doktor Faustus], and Felix Krull [Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull]. The novels appeared in print even during the author’s enforced emigration at the time of Nazi persecution. Resulting from this collaboration with the publisher, which exemplifies preservation and propagation of German literature’s humanistic traditions, was the fact that, upon Mann’s death, none of his completed works ended up locked up in his desk — all having been published.

DOKTOR FAUSTUS ROMANINDA FRENGİYE YAKALANAN BİR MÜZİSYENİN TRAJİK ÇÖKÜŞÜ

In world literature, “Faust” or “Faustus” is the hero of an ancient and popular medieval German classical myth. This concept, which is thought to be derived from German epics, inspires many artists. Apart from the works created with this name on its own, it corresponds with various references in many works. He made a deal with the devil due to his curiosity and was eventually cursed. Although the historical origin of the name and character of Doctor Faustus is not very clear, many sources report that he was a German doctor named Johann Georg Faust. He was also a sorcerer and alchemist who probably lived around Wittenberg in Germany in the first half of the 1500s. Many references have been made to this concept in many works along with the works titled with this name. Although many works have been written on Faust, especially the works of Marlove and Goethe remain a masterpiece. One of them is Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus which was first published in German in 1947. In this novel, the biography of Adrian Leverkühn, an extremely talented and intelligent person, is handled with a subjective approach. A composer who was first interested in the field of religious sciences, suddenly changed his direction to the field of music. When he was at the top of his profession, he slept with a prostitute, contracted syphilis, and died as a result of a tragic collapse. In this work of Thomas Mann, which is described as a masterpiece by some critics, the au-thor manifests his intellectual identity as in his other novels. The artist, floundering in the conflict of mind and emotion, makes a deal with the devil who comes to visit him one night when he is in spiritual bondage. According to this agreement, on the condition that he renounces love and affection for 24 years, the devil will inspire him with great compositions and he will reach the top of his profession. The author habitually touches upon almost every discipline, especially art and medicine. While the reader goes back and forth through the plots of the novel, he also develops his general culture. The author does not neglect to inform the reader in this context. In this novel, details about the science of music bring additional value to the novel. The author also criticizes Germany's Nazi authority through an artist who suffers from syphilis. He uses political criticism by associating syphilis with the political, economic, and democratic collapse of the authority. In addition to syphilis, typhus and pneumonia are also mentioned in the novel. This study analyses the psychological collapse and the loss of social dignity of a musician through Thomas Mann’s novel titled Doctor Faustus.

Rewriting Mythology: Tautegory, Ontology, and the Novel

In Schelling’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, he outlines an aesthetic theory of the novel and how it communicates truth, based around his Identitätssystem. In doing so, he understands truth as symbolic, where the symbolic is tautegorical. In his later lectures on mythology he instantiates a new understanding of ontology and mythology as tautegorical, and makes gestures towards how to understand aesthetic forms based on these new accounts. This paper explores how that new aesthetic understanding of truth, ontology, and aesthetics can be used to create a new Schellingian theory of the novel. To explore this, the paper looks at the worldview presented in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, arguing that it could be seen as the late Schellingian novel and as such, present a new paradigm for understanding truth as communicated through literature.

THE ‘DUNKELMÄNNER’ OF DOKTOR FAUSTUS: HUMANISTS VERSUS THEOLOGIANS

AbstractThis essay considers the treatment of theology in Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus. Specifically, it proposes theology as meeting‐point of the two opposing elements characteristic of German cultural history: humanism and fanaticism (‘the demonic’). The most significant representatives of humanism are the so‐called ‘Dunkelmänner’: the Christian humanists of the Reformation period and authors of the Epistolae obscurorum virorum. In these letters, we encounter the refined creative capacity of the human mind and spirit, in contrast to the excessive coarseness of the protestant Reformation and Martin Luther. The novel's narrator Serenus Zeitblom identifies himself particularly with Crotus Rubianus and Erasmus as representatives of both the classical and the Christian cultural world, a tradition threatened by fanaticism and violence in the twentieth century as in the sixteenth. The Epistolae arose from the burning of Jewish literature, and Mann's point is that the enfeebled German intelligentsia of the Third Reich now contains no true ‘Dunkelmänner’ – except perhaps himself. The essay also examines the sources of the theological material in the novel, both with reference to the characters in the university faculty in Halle and to the theological concepts themselves which give the novel its essential substance and are therefore necessary to its understanding.

Ein anders unfester Text

Abstract Printed anonymously in 1587, the henceforth immensely successful Historia von D. Johann Fausten is both a textual and a narratologic provocation. This is brought about by the polyphony of sources and genres compiled by its author which do not produce a homogeneous whole. But it is also the result of a specific, hybrid conception of text and narration, which intendedly creates ambiguity and scatters irritation everywhere. A valid interpretation is thereby sheerly impossible, which presumably is the most significant reason for the long and controversial discussions among readers and re-tellers, running from Christopher Marlowe (1592) and the Wagnerbuch (1593) up to Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947). This article explores some essential textual aspects of this inexhaustible narrative, such as the discursive and hermeneutic predominance of intradiegetic instances (first of all Mephostophiles) and the decommissioning of the narrator by inserted documents, transtextual references, and primarily by paratexts which almost lead a life of their own on the margins of the story in a proper sense. In this way, the text gets fluid, and its reception becomes an endless search for a coherent meaning which isn’t right there.

Music Education as Faustian Bargain: Re-Enchanting the World with Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus

Abstract This article explores the musical motifs in Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel Doktor Faustus and how they relate to the novel’s particular Bildung character. We claim that the novel allows for a challenging musico-pedagogical reading, which opens up new and highly imaginative perspectives on music and music education. Going beyond interpretations that mainly discuss the element of music in light of the novel’s metaphysical or sociocritical pretentions, we believe that Adrian Leverkühn’s musical Bildung materializes a discourse that is primarily educational and affirmative. Bringing in elements of various “posthumanist” philosophical traditions, our article elaborates a musico-pedagogical concept of technology. On the one hand, this enables a wholly new and more appreciative understanding of what Leverkühn’s Faustian bargain could be about; on the other, it allows us to radically rethink the theoretical narrative(s) of musical science and education. The outcome is the call for a “pedagogy of pure instrumentality.“ By seducing students to take part in an experimental and care-ful study for immanent musical technics (rather than techniques), education allows music to re-invent itself, to keep researching the magical procedures and instruments that link together sound and meaning in diverse musical practices, beyond any teleological appropriation.

Thomas Mann and the infectious diseases in the first half of 20th. century. Second part: Tuberculosis, cholera and transplants

Surely Thomas Mann is today a forgotten writer, with only a little and selected group of readers between our young colleagues. However, perhaps could be useful for the others some knowledge about his vision of the infectious diseases in the first half of the twentieth century, when he wrote the novels here reviewed. Typhoid fever, meningitis, syphilis, tuberculosis and cholera are present in Mann's thematic from Buddenbrooks till Doktor Faustus, always with a personal focus, more on spirit -the will to live- rather than flesh and bones... or bacteria. One of his lasts and minor works let us throw an ironical glance over transplant, no so named, indeed, by Mann, who speaks of "exchange". In this second part we present tuberculosis, cholera and…transplant.

Thomas Mann and infectious diseases in the first half of the 20th century. Part I: Typhoid fever, meningitis and syphilis

Surely, Thomas Mann is today a forgotten writer, with only a little and precious group of readers between our young colleagues. However, perhaps could be useful for the others some knowledge about his vision of the infectious diseases in the first half of the twentieth century, when he wrote the novels here reviewed. Typhoid fever, meningitis, tuberculosis, syphilis and cholera are present in Mann's thematic from Buddenbrooks till Doktor Faustus, always with a personal focus, more on spirit -the will to live - rather than on flesh and bones… or bacteria. One of his later and minor works let us throw an ironical glance over transplant, no so named, indeed, by Mann, who speaks of "exchange". In this first part we present typhoid fever, meningitis and syphilis.

Music into Fiction: Composers Writing, Compositions Imitated

Music into Fiction: Composers Writing, Compositions Imitated

The Violin ed. by Robert Riggs

Reviewed by: The Violin ed. by Robert Riggs Chelsey Belt The Violin. Edited by Robert Riggs. (Eastman Studies in Music.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016. [x, 326 p. ISBN 9781580465069 (hardback), $39.95; ISBN 9781782048527 (e-book), $39.95; ISBN 9781782048978 (e-book for handhelds), $24.99]. Music examples, illustrations, endnotes, index. Summarizing the essence of an individual instrument, particularly one as ubiquitous as the violin, is a risky endeavor. Existing histories of the violin have incited their share of controversy, and general studies must grapple with the problem of scope, the subject ever too broad to be treated satisfactorily by a single author. Robert Riggs acknowledges these pitfalls in his preface, stating that the book is by no means comprehensive and neither a history nor an encyclopedia; instead, the goal is to provide "space for moderately detailed discussions" on a few topics (p. xii). The majority of the five-author volume forms a chronological discussion of repertoire in the modern West, though outer chapters touch on symbolism and non-Western traditions. Riggs addresses The Violin to an audience of serious performers and informed listeners, to expand their understanding of "the musical and cultural contexts of the violin and its repertoire" (ibid.). This group is certainly well served by targeted literature, but such undertakings are always in danger of perpetuating undue historical stereotypes. In "Associations with Death and the Devil," Riggs interprets "deeply entrenched" [End Page 440] cultural traditions that position the violin as a symbol of mortality and the demonic (p. 3). He invokes the early Church's condemnation of dancing and instrumental music, and discusses twelfth- through fifteenth-century "Dance of Death" iconography: illustrations of skeletons dancing with the living, sometimes playing instruments (p. 5). In later vanitas and memento mori illustrations, instruments sometimes symbolize material pleasures. He also considers Romantic literary trends and the sensationalism surrounding Nicolò Paganini, both of which resulted in associations with the supernatural. Riggs identifies reflections of these attitudes in nineteenth-and twentieth-century musical compositions. The final element of his argument is the epithet "the devil's box," which came into use among some rural, conservative Americans due to the fiddle's connection with dancing and secularity (p. 30). By my estimation, the evidence presented by Riggs in chapter one is not sufficient to assert that the violin's associations with death and the devil were culturally pervasive before the nineteenth century. While church figures have in certain cases condemned dance and instrumental music as lascivious, blame was rarely aimed at bowed strings in particular. Riggs notes that medieval iconography often depicts the devil dancing; it is true that the violin has consistently been associated with dance music, but because the violin family was not widespread until at least the mid-sixteenth century, these examples cannot apply to its reputation. Most Dance of Death scenes also appeared pre-violin family, and, as Riggs states, the majority of instruments represented were not bowed strings (p. 8). After introducing the violin family (unfortunately applying the anachronistic label "cello" to the bass member) and its development into the seventeenth century, Riggs argues that depiction of violins and other instruments in seventeenth-century memento mori art (intended to remind viewers of their mortality) is another connection to death (pp. 13–14). The first example depicts Death as a skeleton violinist behind a couple engaged in music making; however, the violin here represents Death's participation in the activity rather than his character. The second is a still life with a pochette (a dancing master's narrow violin) and a skull resting on a music book. Rather than death itself, the pochette symbolizes mortal vanities that death will render irrelevant, so neither image quite positions the violin as inherently symbolic. It is the romantic imagination that allows such associations to materialize. Next, Riggs surveys the violin's role in fiction since the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 is divided along subgenres: novels featuring violinists' personal and professional lives; violin-playing detectives in mystery and crime; violins as characters or recurring symbols, fantasy and the supernatural; and short stories. Riggs finishes with Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 1947), blending the previous categories. This series...

Metaphysical Mirroring: The Musical Structure of Society in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Hermann Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel

Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Hermann Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel are novels in which music clearly plays a significant role. This article explores the ways these two authors use analogies to dodecaphonic and baroque music in order to engage with an early German romantic ideal first expressed by Novalis, i.e., the idea that music, language, nature, and mathematics are autonomous systems which should, in a perfect world, mirror each other.

‘The Sermons in the Stones of Germany Preach Nihilism’: ‘Outsider Rubble Literature’ and the Reconstruction of Germany, 1945–1949

This article explores the literature and film produced by the writers and filmmakers sent by the British and Americans to occupied Germany in the four years after the war. Although these figures were intended to help transform the mentality of the Germans, it is argued here that they had less effect on Germany than Germany had on them, and that the crucial (albeit unwitting) result of their visits to Germany was the creation of a genre of art here named ‘outsider rubble literature’ or Fremdentrümmerliteratur. This is a genre that asked, ultimately, what right the Allies had to judge Germany from outside when they were guilty too. It comprises a series of fundamentally ambivalent works of art that often manifest their ambivalence by juxtaposing the two forms of destruction experienced in Germany: the destruction of the bombed cities and the destruction wrought in the concentration camps. The article suggests that this genre of ‘outsider rubble literature’ includes Thomas Mann's great postwar novel Doktor Faustus, arguing that our understanding of this novel is increased if we read it alongside the postwar writing of Stephen Spender, Martha Gellhorn and Klaus Mann, and the postwar filmmaking of Billy Wilder.

Secularization Without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee by Vincent Pecora

Reviewed by: Secularization Without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee by Vincent Pecora Joseph Blankholm Vincent Pecora, Secularization Without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015, 214 pp. In Secularization Without End, Vincent Pecora applies to the novel the prescient framework he developed in Secularization and Cultural Criticism, in which he argued that secularization is a process characteristic of modernity that creates the modern by extirpating the religious and anything else that is not secular or rational. In turn, the modern is far more entangled with the religious than its self-understanding permits it to recognize, not only because it sequesters itself to the spaces that remain uncontaminated by religion, but also because it arises from the very past from which it works to make a break. In Secularization Without End, Pecora recovers the religiosity that persists in the novel despite its ostensible status as the secular modern genre par excellence. Focusing on the Calvinism that pervades the work of Samuel Beckett and J. M. Coetzee and the influence of Augustine on Thomas Mann, Pecora demonstrates convincingly that a secular critical perspective will always fail to understand these authors’ novels because it must blind itself to the presence of theology and because these authors write self-consciously from within a tradition that modernity, in its hamstrung binary, can only recognize as theological. Working beyond this binary at the same time that he derides its myopia, Pecora argues for a critical approach that is neither secular nor religious, that draws its explanatory power from both streams at the expense of neither, and that finds in the combination of temporal and sacred narratives a rich description of the human condition that would otherwise remain illegible. At times challenging because it unsettles the perspective from which it attempts to see, Secularization Without End nonetheless offers its reader a sure guiding hand (as well as many precise and sonorous turns of phrase). It is unlikely to convince the committed secularist to let down his guard against the religious, though it provides a valuable contribution to those who find the persistence of religion a worthy modern mystery or who have seen and felt, if only obliquely, the peculiar contradictions of the secular novel. In the book’s first chapter, Pecora manifests in Beckett’s writing “a distorting transformation of a Calvinist, Puritan religious tradition” (26). With the term distortion, Pecora refers to Heidegger’s Verwindung, which he sometimes translates in [End Page 359] Lucretian vocabulary as the “swerve” to describe the non-teleological movement of history, “a peripeteia—a wandering, errant process that often folds back on itself, producing not only the return in distorted form of something perhaps hastily repressed … but also a host of unintended consequences … that we have only begun to understand” (22). The swerve of history is the distortion of the past through the constraints of the present—an inheritance neither faithfully received nor forsaken. Beckett acknowledged his debt to the Calvinist philosopher Arnold Geulincx, who described himself as a spectator in a machine-like world in which he is unable to make any difference because he and the world are creations of a God who is infinitely distant but totally in control. Beckett’s absent God does not make room for human agency. The individual’s authorial “I” is always also authored, “since he is never anything other than the personae that come to life through him, unbidden… and yet inescapable” (54). In Beckett’s mechanical world, like the predetermined one of Calvin, we are observers who have become aware midstream of a process we did not set in motion and cannot complete. In the second chapter, Pecora reads in Mann’s Doktor Faustus the “distorted echoes” (58) of Augustine and in its protagonist an uncertain hope that the truth can set him free of the need for divine grace. Leverkühn turns away from God in a pact with the devil that guarantees his musical virtuosity, and in the process, he descends into a moral corruption like that of Hitler’s Germany, which made “genocide itself seem to the perpetrators a heroic task” (71). The novel’s narrator, Zeitblom, asks without answer whether there can...

The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature; Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle ed. by John Walker (review)

Reviewed by: The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature; Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle ed. by John Walker Arnd Bohm John Walker, ed., The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature; Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle. London: Legenda, for Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2013. xii + 204 pp. A festschrift honors someone or some event and also recognizes the celebrants, the members of a select community. The person being celebrated here is Nicholas Boyle, immediately familiar for his magisterial Goethe biography, of which two volumes have appeared so far. He is less well known for his concerns about the current state of the world of learning—and of the world—as signaled by his Who Are We Now? Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney (1998) and by his 2014: How to Survive the Next World Crisis (2010). The wide range of Boyle’s interests does not exceed the capable reach of the fifteen contributors to this volume, although the whole does demand sturdy readers, ranging as it does across German literature from the Baroque to Thomas Mann but also including Shakespeare, Les Murray, and Seamus Heaney. More than half of the contributions deal directly or tangentially with Goethe. John A. McCarthy’s “Cognitive Mapping: Adam, Venus, and Faust” is a complex discussion that brings together the most recent neuroscience with paintings by Michelangelo and Giorgione to shed light on Faust. The short essay by T. J. Reed, “Goethe as Secular Icon,” is part of a long-standing disagreement with Boyle’s interpretation of Goethe the poet. It is a supplement to the critical review of the biography Reed published in 2001; he proposes that Goethe’s stance was marked by “delighted assent” (47) and not just by absences. Charlotte Lee’s contribution is “Mignon and the Idea of the Secret.” Regina Sachers shows unexpected parallels between Goethe’s “Urworte. Orphisch” and Mörike’s “Besuch in Urach.” Ritchie Robertson touches on, among other things, Egmont and Die natürliche Tochter in assessing Goethe and Machiavelli. Martin Swales compares Iphigenie auf Tauris and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in “The Human Epiphany.” Christoph Jamme in “Enlightened Mythology: Thomas Mann and Myth” and John Walker in “Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and the Site of Literature” deal with a question that remains alive for modern literature: namely, what the role of myth can or should be. Walker connects this with Boyle’s concern for “the theological and cultural meaning of the secularization of the Christian tradition” (109). The triangulation of the relationship between theology, literature, and mythology continues to be a pressing issue. What is the connection between [End Page 318] faith and knowledge? That the question is not of recent origin is shown by Helen Watanabe O’Kelly in her all-too-brief “Ways of Knowing: Blaise Pascal, Angelus Silesius and Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg.” The inclusion of two poets who might be unfamiliar to Germanisten can only be a benefit. Ian Cooper focuses on one poem by Les Murray, Australia’s great poet. He elucidates him via Roland Barthes and Caravaggio, placing him at the center of European tradition. Seamus Heaney is revealed to have been anything but a marginal Irish writer in Eamon Duffy’s “Seamus Heaney and Catholicism.” Duffy reads Heaney’s career and works, tracing the move from minority status in Northern Ireland to the struggle to reconcile the tensions between poetry and faith in troubled times. Boyle’s convictions as a citizen of his country as well as of the republic of letters are foremost in H. B. Nisbet’s “‘Just One Damned Thing after Another?’ Some Reflections on the Philosophy of History,” in Mark Ogden’s “Christian Humanism and Higher Education,” and in Paul Connerton’s “Seven Types of Forgetting.” Nisbet’s reflections on the rise of history are thoughtful, as always. Mark Ogden grapples with the thorny issue of whether universities today can resist commercialization and can sustain ethics. It remains for Connerton to draw attention to the importance of forgetting in our modern consciousness as he surveys types of nonremembering. His few telling paragraphs on how the Germans managed...