Fourth Thomas Mann Lecture – Save the date
In 2020, Professor Ritchie Robertson from the University of Oxford will be a guest speaker at ETH Zurich as part of a lecture series on Thomas Mann. He will be lecturing on the topic of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment on The Magic Mountain.
The fourth Thomas Mann Lecture will take place on:
- Wednesday 04.11.2020 from 6.00 p.m. to 7.00 p.m.
- This year’s Thomas Mann Lecture will be delivered virtually
Please register by 27 October 2020 by contacting: .
In the novel The Magic Mountain, the protagonist Hans Castorp follows the heated debates between the humanist Settembrini and the Jesuit Naphta. These two opponents respectively embody the Enlightenment associated with Romance culture and reactionary, totalitarian Counter-Enlightenment. The lecture explores Thomas Mann’s conception of the two terms and, with reference to the present, examines the undiminished relevance of Enlightenment values in an age of Counter-Enlightenment populism.
Every year, an internationally renowned literary scholar is invited to lecture at ETH Zurich. The Thomas Mann Lectures series addresses fundamental and topical issues inherent in Thomas Mann’s oeuvre and is aimed both at the interested general public as well as an academic audience.
The Thomas Mann Lectures are organised by the Thomas Mann Archives in collaboration with the Professorship of Literary and Cultural Studies at ETH Zurich.