Rüdiger Görner – The ironic world citizen

Abstract. Repeatedly, Thomas Mann asked himself whether he had 'assembled' sufficient amounts of 'world' in himself in order to embark on a new novelistic project or whether his literary works contained enough aspects of 'the world'. This lecture will discuss Thomas Mann's conception of 'worldliness' in relation to his aesthetic concerns but also in respect of his experiences in exile. It will attempt to assess the specificities of Thomas Mann's preoccupation with this problem and single it out as one of the hallmarks of his artistic achievements and cosmopolitan.

Rüdiger Görner, MA PhD teaches German and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London where he is also the Founding Director of the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations and the Convenor of German in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film. His main research interests revolve around Georg Trakl and literary Modernism,  literary representations of the five senses, the poetics of voice, the Tower as a literary figuration and he has extensively published on Hölderlin's poetics, the Goethezeit, the Austrian literature from Stifter to Thomas Bernhard, on Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann and his notion of finality in culture as well as studies on literary aesthetics.