SOURCE: Malmgren, Carl D. “‘From Work to Text’: The Modernist and Postmodernist Künstlerroman.” Novel 21, no. 1 (fall 1987): 5-28.

In the following essay, Malmgren gives an in-depth scrutinization of Thomas Mann's “Tonio Kroger” and John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, using them as examples of modernist and postmodernist künstlerromane respectively.

“… what an artist talks about is never the main point.”

—John Barth quoting from Thomas Mann's “Tonio Kroger” in “The Literature of Replenishment”

Pretext

From modernism to postmodernism. If the twentieth century has witnessed a dramatic change in sensibility, a shift in the prevailing episteme, and if that shift registers itself foremost in the very nature and function of the aesthetic artifact, then one way to define the transformation would be to examine in detail representative narratives which deal directly with the development of the artist and the nature of his or her calling. I have chosen as...