Thomas Mann's Joseph and his brothers

the long version

William E. McDonald's study Thomas Mann's "Joseph and His Brothers" works from two fresh premises. First, Mann loved to perform his writing in public. By viewing all his productions as scripts as well as high modernist texts McDonald gives contemporary readers a new vision of their interconnectedness. Second, the scores of essays and lectures that Mann composed during the "Joseph" years (1926-1943) interweave with the mammoth tetralogy in complex ways. McDonald theorizes these relationships around the idea of a particular kind of intertextuality: "self-influence." Three of these lectures - "Kleist's Amphitryon" of 1927 and Mann's two Freud lectures of 1929 and 1936 - best represent two kinds of intertextual self-influence at work throughout the tetralogy: the half-conscious return to Kleist's great German ethical drama, and the more deliberate wrestling with Freud. Long studied through his artistic and especially his philosophical ancestors. Mann's tetralogy takes on new life when reread in light of these premises.