[USML Announce] Ask Andy

[springkerb at aol.com]

Although you have directed your question to Professor Klein, I would like to contribute the following snippet, which I hope is of sufficient intellectual merit to warrant inclusion in this discussion.  At least to my untrained eye, it appears that you may have made yourself a proverbial Faustian bargain.  Perhaps the tale below will seem strangely familiar.

Thomas Mann's 1947 Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde adapts the Faust legend to a 20th-century context, documenting the life of fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn as analog and embodiment of the early 20th-century history of Germany and of Europe. The talented Leverkühn, after contracting venereal disease from a brothel visit, forms a pact with a Mephistophelean character to grant him 24 years of brilliance and success as a composer. He produces works of increasing beauty to universal acclaim, even while physical illness begins to corrupt his body. In 1930, when presenting his final masterwork (The Lamentation of Dr Faust), he confesses the pact he had made: madness and syphilis now overcome him, and he suffers a slow and total collapse until his death in 1940. Leverkühn's spiritual, mental, and physical collapse and degradation are mapped on to the period in which Nazism rose in Germany, and Leverkühn's fate is shown as that of the soul of Germany.






-----Original Message-----
From: Brad Jansen <bljansen at gmail.com>
To: USML Announcements <announce at usml.net>
Sent: Tue, May 31, 2011 9:29 am
Subject: [USML Announce] Ask Andy


Dear Professor:
  I make a deal with Winick and find myself in 7th place.  How did that happen?
Regards,
Bewildered Brad

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