Here you’ll find various secondary materials, mainly scholarly articles about the novel. Access for registered students only. Some readings will be required for Davidson College students.
The readings below are in a folder, linked here (access for registered students only). Spoiler alert!
Russell A. Berman, “Modernism and the Bildungsroman: Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain,” The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel (2004).
Hermann Weigand, chapters from his book The Magic Mountain: A Study of Thomas Mann’s Novel Der Zauberberg (1965), which remains required reading for students of this novel. Start with the preface, then read “classification” and “organization,” and then up to you. The “Ironic Temper” is key to all readings of Mann since Weigand.
Michael Beddow, “The Magic Mountain” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann (2002).
Joshua Kavaloski, “The Enactment of Time in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg” (2014). A more technical treatment with attention to narrative theory.
Related to our own double seminar practice, with one in the academy and one outside the academy, is this delightful study by Katrina Watroba, Mann’s Magic Mountain: World Literature and Closer Reading (2022), in which she thinks about different kinds of readers, academic and non-academic. I include the introductory chapter “Somehow Beside the Point?”
For a good time, read Susan Sontag‘s “Pilgrimage – Tea with Thomas Mann,” which may be fiction or is it? From The New Yorker (1987). And for the deep dive into the relationship between the experience of reading The Magic Mountain and the life of the mind – in this case Susan Sontag’s – read Kai Sina‘s study of Sontag reading Mann “Reading The Magic Mountain in Arizona: Susan Sontag’s Reflections on Thomas Mann” (2015). So fun! (especially footnote 14)
[new materials are being added throughout the summer and fall]
