Doctoral Fellow in Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies"

April–September 2025

The Mythic Novel as Literary Currency: A Study of Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers

This project regards the mythic novel as a specific literary form of the modern age and examines its function and development as literary currency in the 20th and 21st centuries. Focusing on Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers (1933–1943), it investigates how myth was reconfigured as a timeless narrative framework and circulated as a mode of literary value. Unlike historical novels, which often engage with specific historical moments, Mann's mythic novel seeks to liberate myth from linear time and create a (seemingly) universal and transhistorical literary space. This timeless dimension allows the writer both to detach the creative sphere from immediate political circumstances and to engage politically on another level. The mythic novel thus operates as an aesthetic strategy that navigates between artistic autonomy and political resistance. This study views how this strategy emerged in the socio-political conditions of interwar Europe, particularly in the context of German exile literature.

By situating Joseph and His Brothers within the shifting dynamics of valuation, this project considers not only how the mythic novel functions as a literary currency in the global literary market, but also the condition of its apparent universality. Watanabe will extend his perspective beyond the tetralogy, examining the transnational and transtemporal reception of Mann's narrative concept and comparing it with contemporary writers such as Orhan Pamuk, J. M. Coetzee and Murakami Haruki. In doing so, this project critically views the formation of a temporal community of modern myth adaptors and reveals both the actuality and the potential limitations of myth as a literary currency in the multipolar world of today.

Takahiro Watanabe is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology at the University of Tokyo, where he also received his master's degree. His master's thesis, The Concept of "Play" in Thomas Mann's Novel "Confessions of Felix Krull", marked the beginning of his ongoing research on Thomas Mann's aesthetics. His doctoral research explores the evolution of Mann's artistic thought by examining the aesthetic duality of "appearance and reality (Schein und Wirklichkeit)" and parallels to the tension between "art and society (Kunst und Gesellschaft)." During this fellowship, he will focus on Joseph and His Brothers, reconsidering Mann's concept of the modern mythic novel in the 1920s and 1930s within the broader framework of political, social, and economic conditions.

From April 2023 to March 2025, he has served as the chief editor of Dichtung/Sprache, the journal of German literary studies at the University of Tokyo.