Down for this. Especially (eventually) Mann. The Magic Mountain defeated me earlier this year and have somehow never read Death in Venice (or Doctor Faustus, or, in fact, Goethe’s Faust, haha).
Awesome, maybe I will do The Magic Mountain, though that I would schedule in the winter. I'd be a pretty poor guide to Doctor Faustus since I don't do music, though it's a great book and, strangely, you don't have to read Goethe to appreciate it.
I would certainly be interested in those courses for one, although I’m afraid I can’t offer much in the way of recommendation or suggestion. On Adorno, the progenitor of maybe my least favorite strand of western leftism (it’s anecdotal yes, but the worst people I’ve known on the left were always the Adorno-Fisher acolytes) I think the thrust of that quote is basically correct. Trilling I believe said broadly the same thing in his essay on The Princess Casimassima, iirc he called the archetype the “Young Man From the Provinces” (the province need not be in the hinterland either, Trilling was arguably one such provincial himself, at least in youth.)
The quote is true but truer with the values inverted: the tradition is usually rescued by outsiders to its decaying and self-hating elite. Young Men from the Province novels were written by men from various provinces. I find Adorno's apocalyptic Old-World scorn immensely charming; it definitely doesn't work as well in lesser hands, though, and Anglo-Americans can't pull it off for reasons both good and bad. Better to concede our native optimism and empiricism! He also wasn't much of a leftist, really, either by old or new standards; followed to its logical conclusion, his thought arrives at neoconservatism.
Down for this. Especially (eventually) Mann. The Magic Mountain defeated me earlier this year and have somehow never read Death in Venice (or Doctor Faustus, or, in fact, Goethe’s Faust, haha).
Awesome, maybe I will do The Magic Mountain, though that I would schedule in the winter. I'd be a pretty poor guide to Doctor Faustus since I don't do music, though it's a great book and, strangely, you don't have to read Goethe to appreciate it.
I would certainly be interested in those courses for one, although I’m afraid I can’t offer much in the way of recommendation or suggestion. On Adorno, the progenitor of maybe my least favorite strand of western leftism (it’s anecdotal yes, but the worst people I’ve known on the left were always the Adorno-Fisher acolytes) I think the thrust of that quote is basically correct. Trilling I believe said broadly the same thing in his essay on The Princess Casimassima, iirc he called the archetype the “Young Man From the Provinces” (the province need not be in the hinterland either, Trilling was arguably one such provincial himself, at least in youth.)
The quote is true but truer with the values inverted: the tradition is usually rescued by outsiders to its decaying and self-hating elite. Young Men from the Province novels were written by men from various provinces. I find Adorno's apocalyptic Old-World scorn immensely charming; it definitely doesn't work as well in lesser hands, though, and Anglo-Americans can't pull it off for reasons both good and bad. Better to concede our native optimism and empiricism! He also wasn't much of a leftist, really, either by old or new standards; followed to its logical conclusion, his thought arrives at neoconservatism.