Boston University’s annual “Big Fat Books” spring symposium is open to all for the pleasure of discussing a very good book. Talks presuppose no specialist knowledge, only that you’ve read (a translation of) the text.

See videos from the symposium Here

Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1912), for all its brevity, stands comfortably among the acknowledged high points of literary artistry in the modern era. Mann himself, looking back, considered that Death in Venice might have been his finest work, surpassing even the great novels that had nearly brought him a second Nobel Prize for Literature, such as The Magic Mountain, the Joseph tetralogy or Doctor Faustus.

In our era, the ocean of responses that Death in Venice has called forth stretches to the horizon. The still-rising tide includes film adaptations and meta-adaptations; fictional hommages from novels of high literary ambition to cheesy knock-offs and pulp romances; graphic novels; a radio play. Death in Venice is an opera; a ballet; an audio walking tour as a “drama for one.” Blog posts, short films, and new translations tumble forth at an increasing rate; and the surge of commentaries, theses, dissertations, monographs, annotated editions, scholarly essays and book chapters long ago surpassed anyone’s ability to enumerate, let alone read.

Fortunately, you can easily read Mann’s story from start to finish in one evening (and that’s likely a sentence we’ll never write again in the Big Fat Books context). Then come to listen and participate on Saturday April 30, 2022 as we together explore Mann’s enduring, seductively mythic Venice of the mind.

 Saturday, April 30   Barrister’s Hall, Sumner Redstone Building, 765 Comm. Ave. (behind 745 Comm. Ave.)

10:00 Welcome and Introduction: William Waters (WLL)

10:15–11:30  Keynote Speaker Stephen Dowden (Brandeis):

“Aschenbach’s Despair: Mann, Kafka, & Beckett”

11:30–1:00 panel 1       Moderator: Catherine Yeh (WLL)

  • Stephanie Nelson (Classics): Phaedrus in Venice
  • Yuri Corrigan (WLL): “Their Theater Was His Soul and They Broke in from Outside”: Mann between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche
  • Marshall Brown (Univ. of Washington, emeritus) Short Story or Novella?

1:00-2:10 lunch (catered onsite for all attendees)

2:10-4:00 panel 2       Moderator: Yoon Sun Yang (WLL)

  • Nathaniel Lew (Music, St. Michael’s): “Eine unbedeutende Nachhilfe”? Death in Venice Embellished for the Operatic Stage
  • Peter Schwartz (WLL): Mann’s Goethean Tricks
  • Keith Vincent (WLL): Gay Idolatry in Proust and Mann
  • William Waters (WLL) : Just Looking : the “Basis of Everything”

4:00 coffee break

4:15 Student Panel (participants TBA)

5:00 reception (nonalcoholic, onsite in Barrister’s Hall)

6:00 Dinner and festivities at Peter Schwartz’s home ~ all symposium attendees warmly invited