Mann's Magic Mountain: World Literature and Closer Reading(Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs)

This is the first study of Thomas Mann's landmark German modernist novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924) that takes as its starting point the interest in Mann's book shown by non-academic readers. It is also a case study in a cluster of issues central to the interrelated fields of transnational German studies, global modernism studies, comparative literature, and reception theory: it addresses the global circulation of German modernism, popular afterlives of a canonical work, access to cultural participation, relationship between so-called 'high-brow' and 'low-brow' culture, and the limitations of traditional academic reading practices. The study intervenes in these discussions by developing a critical practice termed 'closer reading' and positioning it within the framework of world literature studies. Mann's Magic Mountain centres around nine comparative readings of five novels, three films, and one short story conceived as responses to The Magic Mountain. These works provide access to distinct readings of Mann's text on three levels: they function as records of their authors' reading of Mann, provide insights into broader culturally and historically specific interpretations of the novel, and feature portrayals of fictional readers of The Magic Mountain. These nine case studies are contextualized, complemented, enhanced, and expanded through references to hundreds of other diverse sources that testify to a lively engagement with The Magic Mountain outside of academic scholarship, including journalistic reviews, discussions on internet fora and blogs, personal essays and memoirs, Mann's fan mail and his replies to it, publishing advertisements, and marketing brochures from Davos, where the novel is set.

About the Author :
Karolina Watroba is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at All Souls College, University of Oxford, where she is also affiliated with the German Sub-Faculty and the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre. She works on modern literature and film across eight European languages and beyond, with a focus on material in German, English, and Polish. She grew up in Krakow, Poland, before moving to Oxford, where she studied German and comparative literature, including a year at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, with funding from the Ertegun Scholarship, the Clarendon Fund, and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.

Review :
Watroba pursues aspects of the reading experience that mainstream literary scholarship often ignores. She unearths some brilliant gems in Mann's mountain, including rarely studied texts that reflect new light on the novel. Karolina Watroba has written a book that's knowledgeable and wide-ranging as well as lucid, engaging, and beautifully written. Not only a fascinating account of the afterlives of Mann's famous novel, it's also a model for how we might do literary criticism differently. In this original and exciting book, Karolina Watroba breaks the mould of reception studies by showing in sensitive detail how an international range of fiction and films, from Alice Munro to Hayao Miyazaki, respond to The Magic Mountain, and thus documenting how a classic novel enters the lives of "professional" and "lay" readers alike. Watroba's purpose is to discover who, outside academia, actually reads Mann's work and what they make of it. This original and insightful study promises "excitement and whimsy" by situating Mann's work in radically new contexts. This new book displays an idea and method, actually a cluster of several methods, in an innovative combination, which introduces its readers to a poetics of reading appropriate for today's cultural world.