Selected Criticism, 1980–2025 (in chronological order)

Detailed analysis of Dürer’s Melencolia I and the theme of melancholia more generally in Doctor Faustus. Argues that Mann deeply identified with Leverkühn, at least in the sense that he believed great art could only be created from a spirit of profound melancholy.

Examines the numerous references to Shakespeare in Doctor Faustus and argues that each successive encounter with the Bard reflects a stage in the evolution of Leverkühn’s attitudes towards love.

Provides a run-down of various literary and historical models that may have influenced the creation of Nepomuk Schneidewein and examines the ambiguous role he plays in the novel.

Analyzes Thomas Mann’s analysis of Nazism, positioning Doctor Faustus as a paradigmatic novel of exile. Connects it to a larger “turn towards myth” amongst novels of the early postwar period.

Maps the Luther-Erasmus dichotomy in Doctor Faustus onto various other facets of Mann’s cultural and intellectual formation. In the process, presents a highly readable synthesis of Mann’s intellectual origins. Defends Luther against his portrayal in the novel.

Analyzes Zeitblom’s role as a narrator in Doctor Faustus. Ultimately takes a positive view of him, arguing that Zeitblom’s prose style is ideally attuned to its subject and that his ambivalences are no less indicative of the age in which he lives than is the fate of Leverkühn.

Examines Doctor Faustus as a Nietzsche novel, paying special attention to Leverkühn’s characteristic laughter, which carries profound undertones in Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Examines Leverkühn’s final composition, the Lamentation of Doctor Faustus, and argues that is an expression of Mann’s fundamentally hopeful and musically conservative worldview, as distinct from Adorno’s more pessimistic embrace of musical modernism.

Examines Mann’s depiction of Jewish characters throughout his career and argues that he remained entangled in anti-Semitic stereotypes.

Examines the crisis of artistic production in which Leverkühn finds himself caught, arguing that his compositions up to the Apocalipsis illustrate the modernist “spatial form” described by literary theorist Frank Kermode.

Pathbreaking essay collection with contributions by almost all of the leading Mann scholars of the time. Contains essays on female and on Jewish characters in Doctor Faustus, on Mann’s views of Adorno and of Joyce, on the treatment of narcissism and of melancholia in the novel, and on Doctor Faustus’s influence on contemporary literature. Originally delivered as lectures, each essay is followed by a short and cogent response.

Argues for Doctor Faustus as a novel that synthesizes realist, modernist, and mythic elements in an attempt to combat Mann’s fear of creating art that would be defeated by its own intellectualism. Points out that the novel elevates to the level of social analysis many elements that previous fictions by Mann had applied to the merely personal.

Applies psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek to Doctor Faustus. Indicts Zeitblom’s attempts to read German history through the lense of the Faust-pact as an “attempt to save an ordering system in the face of the catastrophe that shatters it.” Argues that Leverkühn recognizes the fundamentally unsymbolizable dimension of murder and tries to bear witness to it through his music, thereby creating an opposition to Nazism.

Examines the recurrence of Christ figures throughout Mann’s oeuvre, including in Doctor Faustus. One of the earliest example of a resurgence of interest in the religious dimensions of Mann’s arts over the past twenty-five years.

A difficult essay, but perhaps the most important analysis of Mann’s debt to Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music available in English. Argues that the views of modernity and modern art articulated in Doctor Faustus are ultimately similar to those expressed by Adorno. (See the 2008 essay by Justice Krauss for a dissenting view.)

Investigates the role that Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theater” plays in Doctor Faustus, arguing that Mann used it to illustrate a Hegelian, dialectical model of history that he had borrowed from Adorno.

Revisionist study which argues that there is no devil’s pact in Doctor Faustus and thus, by extension, also no damnation of Germany. The true Faustus figure is instead Serenus Zeitblom, and Mann’s novel seeks to deliver a “message of compassionate love” emblematized by the relationship between narrator and protagonist.

Examines the personal and emotional dimension of the collaboration between Mann and Adorno. Argues that in chapter XXV, the devil adopts the appearance not of Adorno but rather of Gustav Mahler, to whose works Mann scattered hitherto underappreciated hidden references throughout his novel.

Concise yet detail-rich examination of Mann’s debts and allusions to Nietzsche both in Doctor Faustus and in his 1947 essay “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events.”

Presents a highly readable summary of the composition history and the main themes of Doctor Faustus. Argues that the main significance of the novel lies in the fact that with it Mann overcame the originally Nietzschean (and therefore nineteenth-century) character of his art and fully turned to the problematic of modernism.

Difficult yet immensely rewarding analysis of the four-fold allegorical structure in Doctor Faustus by America’s leading Marxist literary critic. Argues for Doctor Faustus as a novel illustrating the transition from high to late modernity.

Argues for 1945 as a “fulcrum” in the composition of Doctor Faustus, since in May of that year the Third Reich came to an end and in December Mann invited Adorno to collaborate on the description Leverkühn’s works. The end of the Reich simultaneously marked the end of the historical period in which Mann felt at home, and his invitation to Adorno signaled a corresponding shift in authorial agency.

Examines Mann’s intellectual relationship to Theodor W. Adorno, arguing (in a break from most other writings on the topic) that Mann preserved his independence from the philosopher and articulated a view of modern artistic expression that is substantially different from Adorno’s.

Detailed discussion of Mann’s debt to Albrecht Dürer. Arguably the most extensive study of this topic available in English.

Places Leverkühn’s admirer Kunigunde Rosenstiel in a long line of characters with markedly “Jewish” names that populate Mann’s fiction and examines how the author deployed such names with anti-Semitic intentions.

Situates Mann within the context of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century imperialism, along with the attending racist and anti-Semitic prejudices. A nuanced discussion that points out the problematic aspects of Thomas Mann’s thought while also honoring his fundamentally cosmopolitan outlook.

Provides descriptions of various real-life musical works that have been inspired by Leverkühn’s fictional compositions, including the soundtracks created for the 1982 film adaptation by Franz Seitz and the 2007 radio play by Leonhard Koppelmann.

Investigates the symbolic overtones of Leverkühn’s syphilitic infection, with particular reference to Paul Julius Möbius’s 1902 study On the Pathological in Nietzsche, which Mann likely consulted in preparation for the novel.

Examines the origins of the theological materials in Doctor Faustus, especially in the Halle chapters (XI–XIV). Argues that the sixteenth-century struggle between Catholic humanists and the more extreme voices of the Protestant reformation is reenacted in the novel.

Analyzes Mann’s problematic depiction of the Jewish character Saul Fitelberg in chapter XXXVII and connects it to Mann’s theory of cosmopolitanism as articulated in his radio addresses and other sources.