The poetics of visuality in Thomas Mann's 'Joseph und seine Brueder: Die Geschichten Jaakobs'

This dissertation investigates the function of the eye and the visual in the first volume of Mann's tetralogy Joseph und seine Bruder. Although Mann attempted (rather successfully) to persuade critics and readers that he was no "Augenmensch," but instead an "Ohrenmensch," scarcely a page of the novel goes by without reference to the eye and acts of seeing. Despite the considerable amount of scholarship on Mann, the tetralogy has received less attention and has not been examined from the perspective of the relationship of visuality to narrative. I explore the lavish attention Mann gives in Die Geschichten Jaakobs to visual detail, visual stimulation, the protagonists' eyes, their ways of seeing, the evil eye, and the effect of a highly visual culture on the protagonists. I situate Mann's application of a poetics of visuality within larger discourses of myth, psychoanalysis, art history, anthropology and biblical scholarship. I argue that the protagonists' acts of looking set up an interpretive frame wherein meaning comes through knowledge gained via sight. An interpretation of the images seen requires an interpretation of the various gazes. I show that Mann's narrative calls attention to eyes and specific ways of seeing, including monocular focus, reciprocal gazes, perspectives, zoom-ins, panoramas, threshold situations, framing, innertextual observers and the narrative observer. Using this framework of visuality, I re-examine the novel's stated purpose of using psychology to take myth out of the hands of the fascists. It becomes clear that Mann refunctionalizes myth by employing a narrative technique that at times closely resembles the narrative logic of film. This dissertation thus illustrates not only the frequent occurrence of eyes and acts of looking, but also demonstrates the extent to which the visual is employed to establish the tetralogy's themes, motifs, structure and interpretive frame.