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This chapter begins by clearing away some ideas about the “philosophical backdrop” of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice as a prelude to approaching it from a different philosophical angle. Plato, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche all hover over Death in Venice. Their fundamental influence on the novella derives from the question central to their major writings: How should one live? The discussions then turn to the novella, which tells of the breakdown of discipline. It presents Mann's anatomy of the breakdown of discipline by highlighting particular episodes and concepts, tracing the ways in which the character Gustav von Aschenbach's will is directed and redirected, and understanding the changes in terms of their deviations from his central conception of himself and of what is valuable. These formulations connect Mann with questions explored by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, with the former's sense of the impossibility of realizing a vision of one's life that would give it worth, particularly with the diagnosis in terms of the blindness and rapacity of the will, and the latter's delineation of the difficulties imposed by culture and history on those who aspire to live well. The chapter hopes to make plausible the thought that Death in Venice exhibits the second grade of philosophical involvement, that it can be read as simultaneously showing, in the milieu of haute bourgeois society, the inevitable failure and frustration of the individual will and the contradiction within the ascetic ideal.

Thomas Mann, perhaps the most widely recognized theorist-practitioner of irony in the 20^th century, provides a crucial test case for any study of irony. This chapter situates Mann at the far end of German romanticism and asks how his understanding of irony relates to that of Schlegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. After sketching key elements in his theory of irony, the chapter reads Death in Venice to determine whether Mann's concept of aesthetic detachment can match the ironic forces inscribed within his fiction. The lucidity, self-consciousness, and aloofness of the novella's narrator stand in marked contrast to the confusion, loss of self-understanding, and demise that progressively beset the main character. This divergence between empirical fallibility and the serenity of intellectual comprehension corresponds perfectly to the concept of irony that Thomas Mann proposes throughout his career. Other elements, however, both thematic and rhetorical, ultimately interrupt this correspondence with an irony of a wholly foreign type.

This chapter focuses on Gustav von Aschenbach, the main character in Death in Venice. It asks: Does he succeed in fitting the disparate elements of his identity together? Is his life invalidated by his capitulation to the lure of beauty? Must the artist inevitably succumb to that lure? For Mann, these were crucial questions, and the creation of Aschenbach was part of his long exploration of them, part of his lifelong endeavor to put himself on trial. The chapter suggests that the elaborate trappings of Death in Venice, the echoes of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, allusions to Greek mythology and play with Socratic dialogues, are disguises Mann used to mask a more basic story about the social distortion of sexuality and its costs. Freed from the conventional prejudices Mann accurately ascribed to his contemporaries, readers today can recognize the novella for what it is.

This chapter considers whether Thomas Mann was uncertain about the death of Gustav van Aschenbach in Death in Venice. It argues that the problem he faced could not have been that of deciding if Aschenbach should die but rather how. The difficulty was to discover the right death for his protagonist, a death that would show what it—and the life that preceded it—meant. Mann allows his readers more than one possibility for Aschenbach's death. Once he reveals that cholera is rampant in Venice, the threat of death is omnipresent, and he supplies a few clues consistent with the conclusion that his protagonist is infected with the dry form of the disease. Yet by presenting this death as so atypical of cholera sicca, he invites us to explore alternatives to what initially appears as the most obvious cause. The chapter also examines Luchino Visconti's film Morte a Venezia, and how he replaced the writer von Aschenbach with a composer of the same name, a composer plainly modeled on—if not identical with—Gustav Mahler. It concludes with an analysis of the two-page coda to Mann's novella.

The exoticization of places is no more evident than in the case of European locales symbolically rendered mysterious, desirous, and threatening, as occurs in the case of Venice and the Swiss Alps, respectively, in Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig and Der Zauberberg. What these central Mann texts share in common with Zweig’s novella Der Amokläufer is the coupling of the exotic topography with both erotic desire and infection illness. This chapter shows thematically how the infectious-erotic topography, in which protagonists experience a moral downfall or loss of rationality, situates a critique of the self-certain and usually dominant European subject in the face of the foreign other. This chapter further outlines in theoretical terms the ways in which usually familiar or ordinary places can be symbolically exoticized by their association with eros and infection.

This chapter examines movements of exploration, discovery and revelation, in their foundational relationship with sensibilities engendered in nineteenth-century mobile vision and in their reconfigurations in cinematic narratives, most obviously in travel films. As an analytical aid, it proposes two particular axes (activity(Left right arrow)passivity and certainty(Left right arrow)uncertainty) along which cinematic movement, and corresponding regimes of modern sensibility can be mapped. The first axis refers to the relationship between the camera and the diegetic body of characters and the second to movement of/in the frame that explores, discovers, or reveals. Through close textual consideration of movement in Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy (Italy, 1954) and Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice (Italy/France, 1971), the chapter illustrates the relevance and analytical value of the two axes. It points towards the cultural and historical specificity of the emotive registers activated in/by movements of exploration, discovery, and revelation. It also revisits the case of the movement of reframing, perhaps the most obvious demonstration of the hegemony of narrative causality over frame composition and frame mobility.

Britten completed his last opera, Death in Venice (1973), just before cardiac surgery during which he suffered a stroke. Not yet 60, he underwent many of the changes associated with extended aging: dependency, physical impairment, the facing of his imminent demise. Known for his work ethic and professionalism, the prolific Britten completed only 9 independent works before his death 3 years later, but productivity is no measure of creativity: the last works stand as some of his best. Britten’s self-identification as a “working composer” underpinned one of the two life narratives that, this chapter argues, structured and gave meaning to his sense of himself. While he retained this narrative to the end, the other story of the self had to be abandoned with his sudden entry into older age: that of being ever youthful. Britten’s delight in the company of young boys, the topic of much gossip, is here seen as rooted in his own strong nostalgia for the innocence and spontaneity of youth. His two life narratives come together in that last opera, Death in Venice, the story of the homoerotic desire for a beautiful young boy experienced by an older artist in the throes of a creative crisis.

This chapter argues that in spite of the dominance of the dynamic, humoral theory of the body for thousands of years scholars still have little understanding of what role humoralism plays in the invention of the homo/hetero binary. To this end, this chapter reads across a range of sexological writing encompassing Richard Burton’s climate-based Sotadic Zone, Havelock Ellis’s observation of a “special proclivity” for homosexuality in the “hotter regions of the globe,” and Victor Segalen’s claim that there is “not much Arctic Eroticism” to explore climate as the aspect of the permeable, humoral body with the longest afterlife. It argues that an examination of what Iwan Bloch calls “Anthropologia Sexualis” will highlight the meanings of the shift from the humoral body to a germ theory of the body for the construction of sexuality. Reading Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) as a text that roots homosexuality in the competing epidemiological regimes of anthropologia sexualis’s humoralism and scientia sexualis’s germ theory, this chapter reads Mann’s novella as providing a key switch point for understanding the divestment of sexuality in humoralism. Moreover, this chapter suggests that Mann's text provides rich models for theorizing sexuality as simultaneously climatic and microbial.

This chapter offers a reading of Geoff Dyer's novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. The contrast between vitality and killjoy is at the heart of Dyer's work. Unlike the traditional novelist who builds up characters by establishing their relation to one another in the tension of developing drama, Dyer has a trick of setting up entire books in insouciant relation to other books, thus placing himself in relation to other writers. This is evident in Out of Sheer Rage (1997), which has Dyer struggling (hilariously) to write a biography of D. H. Lawrence. Just as Jeff in Venice frequently alludes to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, so it also looks forward to Death in Varanasi. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi offers a powerful affirmation of Dyer's authorial control, literary ambitions, and trademark balancing act between seriousness and flippancy.

Analysis of exhaustion in the context of contemporary stress and burnout theories and debates (primarily psycho-social and socio-political approaches, with hormonal/biomedical underpinnings). Literary examples: Graham Greene, 'A Burnt-Out Case' and Thomas Mann, 'Death in Venice'.

This chapter brings up the question of writing and literature because what Mann strongly points to in Death in Venice is the fact that narrative, beyond all else, most potently serves as a domain for the consideration of other options, for possible worlds of side-shadowing and play. One of the most powerful lessons that we learn from Camões, Martorell, and the Rekontamiento del rey Ališandre (among others) is that the world can always be otherwise. The principal focus is on the fact that, even within the totalizing vision of empire, of hard-and-fast divisions between the subject and the object of colonial authority, narrative allows for the infinite to be given play, for a conversation to be taken up.