La morte a Venezia e l’insorgenza dell’opera: il movimento, la forma, il nulla Una prospettiva sulla novella manniana attraverso il Künstler- roman europeo e la cesura heideggeriana dell’Ursprung des Kunstwerkes

This essay is a re-reading of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice in the light of the tradition of European Künstlerroman between Balzac’s Sarrasine, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Gustave Flaubert’s La Tentation de saint Antoine. The comparative analysis of the texts shows that the European Künstlerroman of the 19th century focuses on the question of desire and lack, which is essentially and always related to desire, as the driving force behind artistic creation. The essay also formu- lates the hypothesis that the Heideggerian theory of the work of art (Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes) incorporated these fundamental speculative issues from the the ex- perience of the Künstlerroman between Balzac, Flaubert, Wilde and Mann.