CES Lunchtime Symposium Speaker Series
Jacqueline Schnieber, Ph.D., Department of English
As part of the dissertation “The Modernist (Con) Artist: Literary Imposters and Narrative Deceptions in German and American Novels,” this presentation explores how Thomas Mann’s final and most directly autobiographical novel, The Confessions of Felix Krull: Confidence Man (1954), re-envisions the artist as a con artist to critically explore, challenge, and reimagine the modern German novel as a self-conscious deception. Felix Krull’s narrative imposture as an artist functions as a complex parody and revitalization of German literary tradition: by justifying his criminal activities as art’s beautiful deceptions, Krull leads the logic of both literary tradition and contemporary society ad absurdum. The novel replicates this parody by making Krull the narrator of his fictional autobiography. This not only magnifies the unreliability of the narrative, but significantly expands on the potential of artistic imposture—as Felix Krull fashions himself through the act of narration, Mann rewrites major German literary traditions, such as the Bildungsroman. In fact, Felix Krull becomes such an act of narrative self-fashioning through imposture as Mann writes himself into Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s autobiography in the figure of Felix Krull, a con artist as artist. Lunch provided.