Andrew's Wiki
Magic Mountain

Eysteinnson on it

• On the Modernity of The Magic Mountain
  • Mann thought he was leaving realist tradition through his use of parody
  • “the manifold, often flagrantly self-conscious, manipulations of time and its relation to narrativity, and the rich but elusive allegorical implications of sickness, which has some affinity with Walter Benjamin’s concept of allegory as the presentation of history as a process of decay.” (189)
  • Mountain as “aesthetic realm” where debates about the modern go on (190)
    • Not supposed to be a real world: its strangeness and distance from the real world = defamiliarizing
• Yet he sees it’s not all modern
  • Its realistic discourse might neutralize some of the other radical elements
  • It’s not as weird as, say, Kafka (190)
• Thus, he says that Mann destabilizes the realism/modernism binary
  • Many modern novels are not “either/or” realism or modernism, but “both/and” realism and modernism