Thomas Mann. Death in Venice. The greatness of modernist novellas. Art’s self-consciousness. Mann as autobiographical writer. Death in Venice as kin to Lolita. The classics as the most deceptively dangerous books. “The coming wave of sex negativity.” A digression on banned books, Fun Home, pederasty, pedagogy, and queer theory. Thomas Mann vs. D. H. Lawrence. Mann’s Orientalism. Italy as the Orient. Getting lost in Venice, the labyrinth of desire. Modernism’s mythic method: Death in Venice and Plato’s Phaedrus, Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, and Euripides’s Bacchae. Apollo vs. Dionysus. Audio drama: Aschenbach’s dream. Turn-of-the-century decadence and Max Nordau’s Degeneration. Does artistic form redeem all subject matter? Is it immoral to make art? Going full Plato. Is the liberation of pedophilia part of the general left-wing project of universal human emancipation? Sexual conservatism as social taboo. “The post-left.” In defense of the old liberalism. Freud, QAnon. Resenting and revering Death in Venice. Does great art redeem everything? Against nature. The roots of aesthetic pederasty in ontological misogyny. Camille Paglia. The revenge of the goddess.
Note: my essay on Mann’s Death in Venice.
Ep. 10. Licentious