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Key Features: * Study methods * Introduction to the text * Summaries with critical notes * Themes and techniques * Textual analysis of key passages * Author biography * Historical and literary background * Modern and historical critical approaches * Chronology * Glossary of literary terms ... Read more

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This collection seeks to illustrate the ways in which Thomas Mann's 1924 novel, The Magic Mountain, has been newly construed by some of today's most astute readers in the field of Mann studies. The essays, many of which were written expressly for this volume, comment on some of the familiar and inescapable topics of Magic Mountain scholarship, including the questions of genre and ideology, the philosophy of time, and the ominous subjects of disease and medical practice.Moreover, this volume offers fresh approaches to the novel's underlying notions of masculinity, to its embodiment of the cultural code of anti-Semitism, and to its precarious relationship to the rival media of photography, cinema, and recorded sound. ... Read more

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Understanding Thomas Mann offers a comprehensive guide to the novels, short stories, novellas, and nonfiction of one of the most renowned and prolific German writers. In addition to analyzing Mann’s most famous works, including Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus, Hannelore Mundt introduces readers to lesser-known works, among them Joseph and His Brothers, Lotte in Weimar, and The Black Swan. In close readings, Mundt illustrates how Mann’s masterly prose captures both his time and the complexities of human existence with a unique blend of humor, compassion, irony, and ambiguity.

Mundt takes readers chronologically from Mann’s literary beginnings in 1894 to his last novel, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. She considers the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche on the emergence of Mann’s literary voice, his conflicted feelings about his bourgeois background, and his life as Germany’s representative writer in the Weimar Republic and in exile. Mundt places Mann’s works in the realistic and modern traditions and discusses his recurring thematic concerns—the individual’s rebellion against oppressive bourgeois conventions and antihumanistic principles, the need for an unremitting questioning of authority and ostensibly absolute truths, and the antagonism between individualistic freedom and social responsibility. In light of the recent publication of Mann’s diaries, disclosing his homosexual inclinations, Mundt also identifies the textual strategies he adopted for revealing and simultaneously masking his secret sexuality.

Mann emerges from Mundt’s analysis as a writer who plays with opposing perspectives in his fictional renderings of both the alienated individual and Germany’s cultural and political history. Mundt suggests that the openness of his works, paired with his deep insights into human existence, explains his stature as a literary figure whose importance extends worldwide. ... Read more

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Deuteronomy is more than a relic of ancient history. It is a living document that deals with issues relevant tot he modern-day reader. This commentary will stimulate discussion about the Deuteronomistic prescriptions for a healthy society. ... Read more

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Quick Review
Advanced.Moderately critical commentary.Not for the passive student. ... Read more

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A Collection of Essays by Thomas Mann, including: Goethe's Faust (1938, Goethe's Carreer as a Man of Letters (1932, Goethe and Tolstoy (1922), Anna Kerenina (1939), Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner (1933), Shopenhauer (1938), Freud and The Future (1936), Voyage with Don Quixote (1934). ... Read more

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Celebration of the suffering of artists
Goethe had a tendancy to make mysteries.His conception of artistic life was esoteric.In 1775 Goethe began to show FAUST to intimate friends.The confidence, the fame were consequences of the success of WERTHER.Gretchen dominates the whole first part of FAUST.The Gretchen story is intellect becoming guilty of preferring beauty.The man of Faustian strivings is a good boy.Goethe died writing.He was a born educator, a citizen, a man of the flesh.His idea of education was derived from Rousseau.He needed praise, having his tender spots.The tumultuous success of YOUNG WERTHER must have been a burden.

Tolstoy was in Weimar when he was thirty years old.Turgenev advised Tolstoy to stop tormenting himself with theology.Goethe and Tolstoy were Olympian.Pedagogic and autobiographic impulses were present to a very great degree in both authors.Someone held that the artistic work of Leo Tolstoy was a tremendous diary.Schiller was kinder to his visitors than Tolstoy.Disease is dehumanizing, but it is also spirit.Tolstoy and Goethe, though, were nature's noblemen.They were aristocratic, long-lived, self-loving. Tolstoy and Goethe felt a naive enjoyment of their exalted status.Goethe was Christian in spirit.His lifework remained a fragment.Tolstoy has been called the great seer of the body.Goethe, synthesizing art and nature, was not a humanitarian.He did not possess an emancipatory conception of humanity.Tolstoy's work, including ANNA KARENINA, had an Homeric element.Thick traditionalism, so much a characteristic of great Russian literary art, connects Tolstoy's novel with Pushkin.Levin is Tolstoy Mann asserts.ANNA KARENINA was begun in the happiest, most harmonious period of Tolstoy's life.In the end the author hated the task and would not have finished the work if it had not been serialized.

Richard Wagner had all the unmistakable traits of the 19th century.The centuryyielded a perfect forest of giants.Nietzsche thought that in the end Wagner was a broken man.Wagner uses psychology and myth to elevate his art.The erotic mother-complex appears in PARSIFAL and THE RING.Wagner's art was a passion of Nietzsche's life.What leaves Mann cold is Wagner's theory.Wagner's genius was in the dramatic synthesis of the arts.It may be argued that Wagner strung together acoustic ideas.Baudelaire wrote to Wagner that hearing his music produced a sense of ecstasy.When Wagner was thirty twohe sketched out artistic plans for the rest of his life.He had a nervous complaint causing melancholy and insomnia.Artistic labors were undertaken with courage and patience.Schopenhauer's philosophy was the great event of Wagner's life.Schopenhauer's system is fundamentally erotic and TRISTAN is saturated with this.Wagner is able to concentrate the intellectual and the popular in one figure.

The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer has always been regarded as creative.Schopenhauer was Nietzsche's great teacher and master.Kant taught about time, space, and causality.The visible world was phenomenal.To Schopenhauer the will was the principle of being.Schopenhauer is the father of all modern psychology. In the opening of an essay on Freud, Mann cites Nietzsche's psychological agony.It is asserted that Freud is the true son of the century of Ibsen and Schopenhauer.Freuds writes interesting prose.He is an artist.The word deep psychology has temporal significance.Freud's lifework is the cornerstone for a new anthropology.

Mann's essays constitute a rich interweaving of ideas calculated to enchant the reader. ... Read more

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This selection of Thomas Mann's letters, first published in a Vintage edition in 1975, spans sixty-six years from the first, written by a precocious fourteen-year-old, to the last, composed on his deathbed by the eighty-year-old Nobel Laureate, and includes letters to family and to such celebrated contemporaries as Gide, Freud, Brecht, Einstein, Hesse, Schoenberg, and Adorno. Covering two world wars and exile in Europe and America, Mann's letters offer the reader insight into the concerns and values of one of the great writers of our time. ... Read more

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The genius of Thomas Mann is seen in his ability to transform his pervasive irony into a thousand things. Irony in Mann is a composite metaphor for all of his ambivalence towards both self and society. Study his works with this text, including Death in Venice, Mario and the Magician, Tonio Kröger, "Felix Krull," and "Disorder and Sorrow."

This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English, New York University Graduate School; preeminent literary critic of our time. The world’s most prominent writers of short stories are covered in one series with expert analysis by Bloom and other critics. These titles contain a wealth of information on the writers and short stories that are most commonly read in high schools, colleges, and universities. ... Read more

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Most researchers, even with computers, find only a fraction of the sources available to them.As Library of Congress reference librarian Thomas Mann explains, researchers tend to work within one or another mental framework that limits their basic perception of the universe of knowledge available to them. Some, for example, use a subject-disciplinary method which leads them to a specific list of sources on a particular subject.But, Mann points out, while this method allows students and researchers to find more specialized sources, it is also limiting--they may not realize that works of interest to their own subject appear within the literature of many other disciplines. A researcher looking through anthropology journals, for example, might not discover that the MLA International Bibliography provides the best coverage of folklore journals.

In Library Research Models, Mann examines the several alternative mental models people use to approach the task of research, and demonstrates new, more effective ways of finding information. Drawing on actual examples gleaned from 15 years' experience in helping thousands of researchers, he not only shows the full range of search options possible, but also illuminates the inevitable tradeoffs and losses of access that occur when researchers limit themselves to a specific method. In two chapters devoted to computers he examines the use of electronic resources and reveals their value in providing access to a wide range of sources as well as their disadvantages: what people are not getting when they rely solely on computer searches; why many sources will probably never be in databases; and what the options are for searching beyond computers.

Thomas Mann's A Guide to Library Research Methods was widely praised as a definitive manual of library research.Ronald Gross, author of The Independent Scholar's Handbook called it "the savviest such guide I have ever seen--bracingly irreverent and brimming with wisdom." The perfect companion volume, Library Research Models goes even further to provide a fascinating look at the ways in which we can most efficiently gain access to our vast storehouses of knowledge. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Useful and well-written
I'm sure I can't tell you anything new about Thomas Mann, so I'll give you my take.

This book was recommended to me by one of my professors in library school. Within pages, you will have insights into patron behavior that you never had before, and this will help you develop strategies for dealing with it.

If you've got the time, delve into the bibliography and additional reading recommendations. Well worth it.

You'll want to buy it, not borrow it. The information is dense and invaluable, and you'll refer to it regularly.

Good deal
Got this book for college, half the price of the college bookstore. Arrived in perfect shape by mail within 3 days. No complaints.

Should be a required text in library school.
I just finished reading Thomas Mann's Library Research Models: A Guide to Classification, Cataloging, and Computers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). It is an outstanding book, one I recommend for all library students and librarians. I wish my reference professor had assigned this as a text!

Mann, who is currently (as far as I know) a reference librarian at the Library of Congress, describes a number of different library research models, including: specific subject or discipline model, traditional library science model (classification scheme, vocabulary-controlled catalog, published bibliographies and indexes), type-of-literature model, actual-practice model, and computer workstation model. He notes the limitations and powers of each approach, and he concludes the book with a cumulative methods-of searching model that uses most of these models to account for the weaknesses of the others. If you want a comprehensive approach to your next massive research project, Mann provides it!

Along the way, he made a number of excellent arguments. The first is that most people believe that the organization of information in the library consists of the classification scheme alone. Thus, people assume the only way to access the information in a library is to find the call number or class where a certain subject might be and browse around that area in the stacks. Unfortunately, this is a deficient assumption. As Mann and critics of classification schemes point out, one book can address many subjects. So, where does a book go then? Similarly, a book addressing one subject can address many different aspects of it. Which aspect should be be brought out in its class assignment? Given these probelms, a person browsing the stacks may be missing several relevant books if he or she restricts the search to one class area in the stacks. Nevertheless, classification is important, as it provides a library user access to the full text of the library's collection. Mann provides examples of information that cannot be found through a library's catalog or various bibliographies and indexes, but only through browsing in the book's of a library's collection.

Another argument he makes is the controlled vocabulary used in the library's catalog is a powerful mechanism for providing access to information. Specifically, controlled vocabulary provides predictability and serendipity. Yes, that's right. Mann provides innumerable examples to show this. He rightly criticizes information scientists who insist that keyword/postcoordinate searches have made controlled vocabulary irrelevant. "Tagging" has become popular. However, tagging lacks authority control and the syndetic structure of thesauri and books of subject headings, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings, and thus lacks the full predictability of formal controlled vocabularies.

Mann describes another aspect not emphasized in research or in library science education: the importance of bibliographies and indexes. He notes that the Library of Congress classification places encyclopedias and other guides to the literature in the A class (these works, he says, serve as a "table of contents" to everything after it, that is, works in the B through V range). Class Z includes bibliographies and indexes. These are at the end in the classification scheme; they serve as an index to everything before it. Mann explains how to find bibliographies, both in the catalog and in the classification scheme, and, again, provides illustrative examples of the usefulness of these works.

If there are powerful, traditional approaches to finding information during the research process, why don't we use them? There are many reasons. Mann speculates at length. One reason is that methods courses in graduate work tend to focus on discipline or subject specific resources (often in the form of lists), instead of library research approaches. Library science education, on the other hand, tends toward the type-of-literature model. Students in a LIS reference course, for example, learn about specific almanacs, atlases, encyclopedias, etc., without learning how to find them more generally, for any subject, using a library's controlled vocabulary. Reference course work in specific areas, such as government information or science, is actually a combination of the type-of-literature and the discipline/subject models. This has been the case, in my experience. If I were to teach a course in general reference, I would definitely assign chapters 3-5 in this book! (These chapters cover the library science model: classification, controlled vocabulary, and published bibliographies and indexes).

Another reason why many of these approaches aren't used is due to what is known as the Principle of Least Effort. Mann refers to this principle repeatedly throughout the book and wrote a chapter on it. We are comfortable chatting with our fellow students or coworkers and asking for good articles or books they may have read or seen, or simply looking at the footnotes of one or two articles we may have happened across in a simple keyword search of some particular database.

Mann's reliance on controlled vocabulary could be considered one of the book's weaknesses. Yes, it is important for finding information in the library, but it is difficult to teach. I would guess that most librarians would not feel comfortable teaching the LCSH! Also, most people loathe to consult the big red LCSH books, but, at the same time, there isn't an easy way to browse them online. Even the LOC's authorities Web site isn't as easy as browsing the LCSH books, in my opinion.

Another criticism of the book may be that it is a systems approach to research. That is, the book emphasizes the systems of research rather than the user. Well, that may be, but Mann does acknowledge the weaknesses of these research models and the systems they use. He also acknowledges that they take some learning. But, especially for print resources, how else is a user to find information in the library? There's been lots of research done on information seeking behavior, but few if any of these studies have suggested real changes to the current library organization model of classification, a vocabulary-controlled catalog, and indexes and bibliographies.

In spite of these possible criticisms, this book helped me see the organization of library information as a whole (classification [browsing], vocabulary-controlled catalog, bibliographies and indexes). This book has me looking very much forward to an update of Mann's other book, which will be released later this year: The Oxford Guide to Library Research.

If you don't know the "red books" you're missing the boat
Dr. Mann (who has a Ph.D. in English and worked as a private investigator at one time) is a senior reference librarian at the LoC and knows his stuff.If you need serious help stop by the main reading room on Weds.nights and you'll likely find him.The book is very good but his personalknowledge is even better!

Not comprehensive as title indicates, but worth reading
Most interesting to me was the author's assertion that digitalization of books adversely affects their preservation, due to the evanescent nature of computer software and hardware standards. A book printed 500 years ago is still readable today. Could the same be said for a CD-ROM 500 years from now ... Read more

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Author of such classics as Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, Doctor Faustus, and The Magic Mountain, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for literature not half-way through his career, Thomas Mann was without doubt the leading German novelist of his era and one of the three or four great writers of our century.

Now, in Thomas Mann: A Life, celebrated biographer Donald Prater illuminates the life and work of this gifted writer, from his upbringing in Lubeck, through his years in Munich, his exile in the United States, and his last years in Switzerland. Prater discusses Mann's tumultuous relationship with his novelist brother Heinrich, which Mann called, "the hardest of my existence," his homosexuality, his career as a prolific essayist, the vast achievement of his novels, and his love of music. Prater writes that as Mann's passion for the gramophone grew almost to a vice, the music became an important motif for his text and a stimulus in its composition. Indeed, Mann conceived of such books as The Magic Mountain as symphonic constructions, interweaving its themes in strict counterpoint. Prater also reveals the personal side of Mann, from his marriage to Katia and his relationships with their six children, all of whom remained marginal to his firmly dedicated life as a writer, to his obsession with the minor ups and downs of his health. Mann's seventy-fifth birthday, for example, found him in typical form: pursuing the usual daily routine of morning work, afternoon correspondence, evening relaxation with the gramophone, and considering the year's lecture tour; but depressed over ailments, which were more or less minor, of ear and throat. But, the particular strength of the biography is the attention Prater devotes to Mann's political thinking and his role in the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. In Mann's development from a nationalistic conservative to a vigorous, anti-Nazi humanist, Prater recognizes a fascinating and crucially important illustration of the "German problem" still so relevant to the Europe of today. Mann could hardly bear even to mention the name of Adolf Hitler, still less to write about the horrors of the concentration camps. And later in his life while still in exile, he admitted it was no easy matter to be a German writer, with conflicting feelings towards one's country "of rage, revulsion, the desire for its destruction, yet an attachment that is inalienable."

Elegantly written and always entertaining, Thomas Mann depicts a man whose life and writing continue to impact our lives today. It will take its place as the major biography of Mann, and as a compelling portrait of 19th- and early 20th-century Germany and the political metamorphosis that country saw during Mann's lifetime. ... Read more

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Perhaps a great find?
Found this today at the annual library sale for $1 and now that I have read the reviews on Amazon I am anxious to read it.

A highly detailed but uninspiring account of Mann's life.
Donald Prater has produced a highly detailed account of Thomas Mann's life.He remains an objective observer and paints a picture of the development of an often cold literary statesman who finds it difficult toform personal relationships.Prater does not dwell on the genesis ofMann's literary production despite his insistence thatMann was notprincipally a political writer but an artist.Instead he gives along-winded account of Mann's travels throughout Europe and America, hisdeparture from Nazi Germany and naturalisation in the USA.The lattersection of the text is larded with references to meetings with his childrenand other literary figures in the USA which do little to aid the reading ofMann's major works of fiction.The author is at pains to justify Mann'sbehaviour after the Second World War and emphasise his disgust for Nazismand anti-Semitic thought. Despite being a detailed and carefully researchedmanuscript, he text is not an inspiring exploration of Mann's life and workand often verges on the tedious.It will be an invaluable companion to theresearch student who wishes to verify precise details in the history ofThomas Mann, but as a companion to the study of Mann's oeuvre it is notsuccessful.A superior guide must always be TJ Reed's 'The Uses of Tradition' which, after 25 years, continues to be the best English Languagecompanion to the life and works of Thomas Mann, providing intelligentinterpretation and valuable insight into the biography of the writer. ... Read more

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Based, in part, on close reading of manuscripts and sources at the Zurich Thomas Mann Archive, Reed's study has long established itself as the standard work in English on Mann's fiction and thought. In this new edition, Reed adds a chapter on the new documentation that has appeared since the first edition. He details the main currents in Mann scholarship over the last two decades, suggesting how we should now see the writer, the man, and the political figure, and, above all, the complex relationship between the three. ... Read more

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Reed is the leading English-writing critic of Mann's work.
First of all, the first posted review under Reed's THOMAS MANN: THE USES OF TRADITION (2nd ed.) is not of Reed at all, but of Prater's recent biography.Reed himself has brought his now 20-year-old study up to date, and it is by far the most aesthetically, politically judicious critique of Mann's career I know of--and written by a scholar who has made significant contributions to an Anglophonic audience's understanding of Goethe, Schiller, and the Weimar classical period generally.One may regret that Oxford books cost so much (!), but in this instance the investment is well worthwhile ... Read more

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Fortunately for us, brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann remained devoted and eloquent correspondents even while disagreeing passionately on matters literary, political, philosophical, and personal. In their correspondence, set against a shifting backdrop of locations in Europe and America, mundane concerns blend easily with astonishing artistic and critical insights. That these irrepressible siblings were among the giants of twentieth-century letters gives their exchanges unique literary and historical fascination. Beginning in Germany and Italy at the turn of the century, the letters document with disarming immediacy the brothers' views on aesthetics, politics, and the social responsibility of the writer, as well as their mutual jealousy, admiration, rivalry, and loyalty. The devastating rift caused by Thomas's support of Germany during World War I and his brother's utter opposition to the war took many years to mend, but they found their way back to friendship in the 1920s. After Hitler rose to power, both writers ultimately sought refuge in the United States. The letters offer a moving portrayal of their struggle, as novelists and socially engaged intellectuals, to bear witness to the cataclysmic historical changes around them and to their experience of exile, in Europe and then in America. This first complete English translation of their correspondence is a dramatic human dialogue and a major literary event. ... Read more

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Letters between 2 Famous Brothers& GOOD GERMANS!!
Two German brothers who came of age in the early 1900's to become world wide literary and historic figures wrote extentively to each other for nearly fifty years. They discuss just about anything two brothers can, and by the Great War were not only literary, but also serious political sibling rivals. Heinrich was the international socialist condemning the war, Thomas supporting the war as an extention of the great German Kultur, of which he was a formost spokesman. They gradually made up, and both expressed their total contempt for the Nazi gang as early as the 1920's. By this time (1929), Thomas won the Nobel Prize, and became the more famous and financially successful. By the late 1930's, they bothmoved to the USA, where Thomas, by then a huge world wide anti-Nazi figure, supported his older brother spiritually and finanically. A unique book of letters between two great 20th Century GOOD GERMANS, though today Heinrich is relatively unknown, compared to his Olympian younger brother. ... Read more