Political themes in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis focuses on the political themes of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus and Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes; it explores in particular the similarities in their treatment of political material. Because of their distinct aims and concerns, art and politics approach social reality in different ways. Topical political discourse especially tends to simplify and systematize life, whereas literature retains and emphasizes its complexities and ambiguities. An examination of Thomas Mann's and Joseph Conrad's non-fictional writings and biographical background indicates that the two authors held political views which were often biased and simplistic. Their fiction, however, mirrors political reality in all its complexity. Doktor Faustus and Under Western Eyes present and dramatize political problems without offering solutions or one-sided views. Through Adrian Leverkühn and Razumov, the essentially demonic nature of the German and Russian national character is investigated. Leverkühn is the symbol and culmination of Germany's cultural history, and his pact with the devil is a metaphor for Germany's movement towards Nazism. Razumov is a typical Russian whose fate embodies the dilemma of a country torn between cynical autocracy and lawless revolution. However, Leverkühn’s and Razumov's involvement with the anti-rational and demonic is not unequivocally condemned. The novels also bring out forcibly the sterility and complacency of Western civilization. Western values are represented by the narrators, Zeitblom and the language teacher, whose criticism of Leverkühn and Razumov is always tinged with their own humanistic tradition. While Mann and Conrad offer an indictment of political systems which threaten the freedom of the individual, they also express a deep-seated scepticism of all political solutions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".