Literature as an educator: Ethics, politics and the practice of writing in Thomas Mann's life and work

Abstract

Abstract Following the definition of ‘practice’ conceptualised in After Virtue, the paper argues that literature as creative writing and reading is a MacIntyrean practice. Literature's key internal goods are spelled out: the common aesthetic enjoyment achieved by the writer's ability to create a truthful fictional narrative the reader is drawn into and the expansion of our narrative identities and self-awareness. Against the conceptual background, the paper asks in which sense can we say that literature as a practice schools us in the virtues. Thomas Mann's work and life are discussed. It argues that Mann's work is both a rich source for us to understand 20th-century German and European bourgeois societies and an ideological obfuscation of such understanding. Drawing on his early conservatism, the paper shows how the practice of writing and Mann's Nietzschean self-assertion allowed him to become a politically engaged writer able to question himself and his culture.