SOURCE: Foster, John Burt, Jr. “Why Is Tadzio Polish?: Kultur and Cultural Multiplicity in Death in Venice.” In Death in Venice: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Naomi Ritter, pp. 192-210. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998.

In the following essay, Foster maintains that Death in Venice begins to “look beyond the elite English and American literature of the period, glimpsing possibilities for cultural multiplicity and interaction that avoid the shackles of grandiose, self-imposed mythologies.”

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Aschenbach is already obsessed with Tadzio when, in chapter 4 of Death in Venice, the writer's block that sent him on his trip to Venice unexpectedly lifts. Responding, as David Luke puts it in the translation chosen for this volume, to “a certain important cultural problem, a burning question of taste,” he finds that he is able to write a short essay (62). But this...