Institute of Philology, Journalism and Intercultural Communication, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia, vvkotelevskaya@sfedu.ru
This article explores the problem of genre dialogue in the times of extra-genre experimentation basing on Thomas Mann’s and Günter Grass’s novels – Confessions of Felix Krull vs. The Tin Drum. Examining these two modernist – or postmodernist, as some Germanists believe, – German neo-picaresque we explore the ways of reconstruction of child, mother, fool, and wiseman archetypes, as well as the very phenomenon of the neo-mythologization of History as an eternal return. First-person narrators in these two novels, Felix Krull and Oskar Matzerath, despite the difference in their fates and the difference in their narrative strategies (imitation of picaro’s memoir and Goethe’s autobiography Poetry and Truth in the former case, and a fairy-grotesque parody of artist’ novel and a picaresque in the latter), both exhibit several picaro features (outsider, observer, unreliable narrator) and deconstruct the Bildungsroman. The character appears in the mask of puer aeternus: the development of an “eternal child” is impossible. Both authors thus criticize the Enlightenment model of the in-dividuum as an autonomous person.
picaresque; Bildungsroman; baroque; Enlightenment; modern novel; parody; pastiche; psychoanalysis; Goethe; Thomas Mann; Günter Grass
Download textFor citing: Kotelevskaya V.V., Virchenko D.V. (2023). Picaro in Thomas Mann’s and Günter Grass’s novels: on the problem of (post)modernist genre thinking. Human being: Image and essence. Humanitarian aspects. Moscow: INION RAN. Vol. 3(55): “Simpleton” and “scribe” in and around literary fiction, pp. 50-76. DOI: 10.31249/chel/2023.03.03