Death in Venice Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Heidi M. Rockwood and Robert J. R. Rockwood

Critical Essay by Heidi M. Rockwood and Robert J. R. Rockwood

SOURCE: Rockwood, Heidi M., and Robert J. R. Rockwood. “The Psychological Reality of Myth in Der Tod in Venedig.” Germanic Review 59, no. 4 (fall 1984): 137-41.

In the following essay, Rockwood and Rockwood offer a Jungian interpretation of Death in Venice and assert that the mythological aspects of the novella are “integral parts of human psychological reality.”

Despite the great number of psychological background analyses of Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Venedig scholars have so far not attempted to read the novella exclusively and consistently in terms of Jungian psychology, especially in the light of Jung's theory of the archetypes. This theory, to be exemplified in more detail later, seems to us particularly well suited as an interpretive foil for Mann's work, since it concentrates on integrating timeless, depersonalized “mythological” elements into a theory of human personality. The presence of both highly personal as well as depersonalized elements has...
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