quote: | Modern European literature often concerns the abnormal and the pathological. Characterized by a macabre sensibility, an attraction to decay and nothingness, an obsession with physical corruption and death, it is defined by a mood of dissolution and disintegration, of paralyzing anxiety and metaphysical despair. Modern writers have inherited from the Romantic period the idea that the artist is ill, and that his illness gives him psychic knowledge and spiritual power. Thomas Mann -- following Goethe's maxim: "The Classical I call the the healthy, the Romantic the sick" -- equates the latter with pathology. He believes "Romanticism bears in its heart the germ of morbidity, as the rose bears the worm; its innermost character is seduction, seduction to death." |
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