Читать реферат по английскому: "The Magic Mountain Essay Research Paper OUTLINEI" Страница 1

(Назад) (Cкачать работу)

The Magic Mountain Essay, Research Paper

OUTLINE

I. Introduction

II. Thomas Mann

A. Biography

B. Mann s other works

III. The Magic Mountain

A. Summary of the novel

B. Commentary

C. Issues mentioned in the book

IV. Conclusion

A. Impact the book had on me

The Magic Mountain written by Thomas Mann is a beautiful, rich novel which presents the major philosophical ideas of our civilization in the form of vivid and fascinating characters. It is certainly one of the most important works of the twentieth century.

Thomas Mann (1875-1955) German novelist and critic, one of the most important figures in early 20th-century literature, whose novels explore the relationship between the exceptional individual and his or her environment, either the environment of family or of the world in general. Mann’s fiction is characterized by accurate reproduction of the details of both modern and ancient life, by profound and subtle intellectual analysis of ideas and characters, and by a detached, somewhat ironic, point of view combined with a deep sense of the tragic. His heroes are often of the bourgeois class, undergoing a spiritual conflict. Mann explored also the psychology of the creative artist. (www.gsprize.com/theme_8.html)

He was a Nobel Prize winner and an unequivocal opponent of National Socialism, Thomas Mann was born on 6 June 1875, the son of a wealthy merchant family in the Hanseatic city of Lubeck. His father had been elected twice as the burgomaster of Lubeck. His mother, Bruhn da Silva, came from a German-Portuguese-Creole family. The decline of precisely such a family over three generations was the subject of his first great work, Buddenbrooks which was written in 1901. (www.zelda.thomson.com/rootledge/who/germany/mann.html)

Buddenbrooks came out when Mann was 26. He began writing it during a one-year stay in Italy and completed it in about two and a half years. The book outraged the citizens of Lubeck who saw it as a thinly veiled account of local incidents and figures. (www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tmann.htm)

Mann s father died in 1891 and his trading firm was dissolved. The family moved to Munich. Mann worked in an insurance office and studied at university before turning to journalism and freelance writing. Early novels and short stories like Tonio Kroger (1903), Tristan (1903) and Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice, 1912) revealed Mann’s preoccupation with the relationship between bourgeois life and the modern artistic sensibility, his fascination with death, and the philosophical influence of Wagner and Schopenhauer. (www.zelda.thomson.com/rootledge/who/germany/mann.html)

In 1905 he married Katja Pringsheim, the daughter of a wealthy Munich family. They had a total of six children. During the World War I Mann attacked liberalism. A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries. (The Magic Mountain).

After ten years of work Mann completed his second major work, The Magic Mountain (1924). The book represented the monument of a lost humanism. It won him the Nobel Prize. (www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tmann.htm)

With the advent of the Nazi regime, Thomas Mann, like his novelist brother, Heinrich, and the rest of the family, immigrated to Switzerland, before moving on to the United States in 1938. (www.zelda.thomson.com/rootledge/who/germany/mann.html)

In 1936 he was officially deprived of his German citizenship and in the same year he was stripped by the Bonn academic senate of his Honorary Doctorate. The Nazis avoided all mention of his name, attempting to expunge his memory from the German consciousness. For his part, Mann took an active part in the anti-Nazi struggle, denouncing the ‘terrible complicity of the German universities’ in breeding ‘those ideas which are ruining Germany morally, culturally, and financially’. (www.zelda.thomson.com/rootledge/who/germany/mann.html)

In America, where he taught for a time at Princeton University, Mann composed a number of anti-Nazi essays, including The Coming Victory of Democracy (1938). It was in his Swiss and American exile that he completed his monumental four-volume novel, Joseph and His Brothers, between 1933 and 1944, a moving tribute to the Jews in their darkest hour and to the freedom of the individual against a corrupt tyranny. (www.zelda.thomson.com/rootledge/who/germany/mann.html)

Mann’s final reckoning with Hitler’s world, with the mixture of genius and madness in the German ’soul’ and the horrors of a collapsing civilization came in his last major novel, Dr. Faustus. Mann died on 12 August 1955 in Zurich, Switzerland, to which he had returned one year before his death. (www.zelda.thomson.com/rootledge/who/germany/mann.html)

Works of Thomas Mann

+ BUDDENBROOKS, 1901 – Buddenbrookit – film 1959, dir. by Alfred Weidenmann

+ TONIO KR+GER, 1903 – suom.

+ TRISTAN, 1903

+ K+NIGLICHE HOHEIT, 1909 – Kuninkaallinen korkeus

+ DER TOD IN VENEDIG, 1912 – Death in Venice – Kuolema Venetsiassa – film 1971, dir. by Luchino Visconti

+ FRIEDRICH UND DIE GROSSE KOALITION, 1915

+ BETRACHTUNG EINES UNPOLITISCHEN, 1918

+ HERR UND HUND, 1919 – Herra ja koira

+ REDE UND ANTWORT, 922

+ DER ZAUBERBERG, 1924 – The Magic Mountain – Taikavuori – film 1982. dir. by Hans W. Geissend rfer

+ BEMxHUNGEN, 1925

+ UNORDNUNG UND FRxHES LEID, 1926 – Early Sorrow

+ VON DEUTSCHER REPUBLIK, 1926

+ Three Essays, 1929

+ DIE FORDERUNG DES TAGES, 1930

+ MARIO UND DER ZAUBERER, 1930 – Mario and the Magician – Mario ja taikuri

+ Past Masters and Other Essays, 1933

+ Tetralogy JOSEPH UND SEINE

Похожие работы