Absolute irony and despairing vision in Thomas Mann's death in venice and T.S. Eliot's The waste land
Date
2018
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Department of English
Abstract
This dissertation attempts to apply Alan Wilde’s concept of absolute irony to
two quintessential modernist texts – Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and T. S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land. In Horizons of Assent, Wilde discusses about crisis in
modernist aesthetics. According to him, this is the crisis of unresolved irony that
modernist texts use as a central trope or consciousness. He names such a modernist
use of irony as absolute irony. When applied to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, it
becomes clear that Mann ironizes the tendency to be sexually immoral and yet the
irony does not condemn it so that ambivalence remains even in the ending of the
novella. For Eliot, the modernist landscape without morality and faith – which he
ironizes – remains a waste land till the end because the rain never falls. The paradox
of death-in-life, which the use of absolute irony gives rise to, in The Waste Land
remains unresolved. So, the dissertation concludes that Alan Wilde’s theory of
absolute irony applies quite well to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land, and that it comes out as a defining characteristic of modernist
aesthetics.
Description
Keywords
Modernist aesthetics, Despairing vision