Congratulations to Dr Karolina Watroba, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at All Souls College, who has just published her first book: Mann's Magic Mountain: World Literature and Closer Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
This is the first study of Thomas Mann's landmark German modernist novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924) that takes as its starting point the interest in Mann's book shown by non-academic readers, moving from interwar Germany and Soviet Russia to present-day Hollywood and Japan, and beyond. It is also a case study in a cluster of issues central to the interrelated fields of transnational German studies, global modernism studies, comparative literature, and reception theory: it addresses the global circulation of German modernism, popular afterlives of a canonical work, access to cultural participation, relationship between so-called 'high-brow' and 'low-brow' culture, and the limitations of traditional academic reading practices. The study intervenes in these discussions by developing a critical practice termed 'closer reading' and positioning it within the framework of world literature studies.
For a taste of what's in the book, you can read Watroba's essay 'The Anxiety of Difficulty: Trying to Read Thomas Mann' in The Point, or listen to her interview 'Magic Mountain on Goodreads: On Experiencing Mann's Novel' for Central European University's podcast Review of Democracy.