THE CRISIS OF SOCIABILITY AND LAUGHTER IN THOMAS MANN'S <i>DER ZAUBERBERG</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The article explores the significance of laughter in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg. While laughter is a prominent feature in the novel, it has not received sufficient critical consideration either in Mann scholarship or, more generally, in studies of modernism. Through close examination of selected episodes of laughter, this study establishes the importance of laughter in the novel, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The analysis examines the extent to which the representation of laughter in the novel conforms to or deviates from recent characterisations of laughter in modernist texts. While certain interpretations of modernist laughter as disruptive and/or pathological can be applied to this text, this is not entirely true of its use in Der Zauberberg. Rather, the significance of laughter shifts constantly throughout the novel, culminating in a crisis of laughter that is part of a larger crisis of sociability and ‘Bildung’. The novel suggests that laughter formerly played a critical role in fostering communication, sociability, self‐awareness, and civility. In contrast, the crisis of laughter towards the end of the novel invites reflection on the loss of these social and humane functions. The crisis of laughter in Der Zauberberg, I argue, is of particular relevance to the interpretation of laughter in other modernist novels which engage in critical dialogue with the ‘Bildungsroman’ tradition.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".