Britten's opera tends to see things in simpler terms. It portrays an Aschenbach who wants a richer form … - Philip Kitcher

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No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.

Philip Kitcher

Britten's opera tends to see things in simpler terms. It portrays an Aschenbach who wants a richer form of sexual fulfillment, and who is hemmed in by the social conventions to which he subscribes. But Visconti's use of the Mahler Adagietto is perfect for what I take to be Aschenbach's sexual desire.

Aschenbach, Desire, Mahler, Perfect, Terms, Use

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Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are inexhaustible. They are celebrations of the ordinary, compelling reactions to philosophical elitism about "the good life". I hope to examine both of them further, doing more justice to Joycean comedy than I did in my "invitation" to the Wake, and trying to understand how the extraordinary stylistic innovations, particularly the proliferation of narrative forms, enable Joyce to "see life foully" from a vast number of sides.

Examine, Good Life, Invitation, Numbers, Philosophical, Proliferation

The variety within Mann's fiction is impressive and fascinating. But Joyce is even more various and many-sided. He begins his career with a wonderful sequence of bleak studies about the ways in which human lives can go awry - in my view, Dubliners is underrated.

Views, Careers, Fiction, Underrated, Dubliners, Joyce

Mann and Joyce are very different, and yet their fiction often appeals to the same people: Harry Levin taught a famous course on Joyce, Proust, and Mann, and Joseph Campbell singled out Joyce and Mann as special favorites. To see them as offering "possibilities for living", as I do, isn't to identify any distinctive commonality. After all, many great authors would fall under that rubric.

Fall, Famous, Joseph, Living, Offering, People

Mann was less interested, I think, in constructing any kind of "portrait of an age" than he was in delineating an individual consciousness in which profound struggles about identity and direction arise - struggles that Mann himself had not only reflected on but felt keenly. Visconti takes up this central focus of the novella, but he couples it with a more social perspective.

Couple, Struggle, Thinking, Reflected, Felt, Struggles

So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.

Artist, Artists, Fighting, Particular, Problems, Thinking