Student Theses and Dissertations
Date of Award
Spring 5-15-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
B.A. with honors
Honors Designation
yes
Program of Study
English
Language
English
First Advisor
Stephanie Vella
Second Advisor
Timothy Aubry
Third Advisor
Claire Grandy
Abstract
My senior thesis argues that disease is a formal element in Thomas Mann’s novel, The Magic Mountain, through the lens of a newly theorized genre: the “Bindungsroman” (“binding-novel”). The scholar Jonas Rosenbrück proposed the Bindungsroman as the successor genre to the Bildungsroman after the latter fell out of public favor after World War I. Whereas the Bildungsroman narrates its hero’s maturation as a process of integration into society, the Bindungsroman’s hero is ontologically unstable and does not achieve normative resolution. This paper examines The Magic Mountain’s protagonist’s development as defined by the doubled play of binding and unbinding, which constitutes the modes of attachment and release to and from the opposing life forces that lie at the heart of this novel’s thematic tensions. This paper proposes and examines four primary dichotomies that articulate this logic of binding: the Dionysian/Apollonian, Enlightened/Irrational Bodies, heteronormative sexuality/queerness, and Central European bourgeois/Eastern others. I examine how tuberculosis underwrites this framework, as in The Magic Mountain, the interplay between infection, contamination, and convalescence fundamentally stages the formal principle of binding-unbinding. By drawing on historical contextualization and disability studies, this paper explores how the formal principle of The Magic Mountain as a Bindungsroman complicates and challenges our notions of health, whether embodied or psychological, by unseating presumptions of national, gendered, racial, and sexual identity.
Recommended Citation
Shi, Julia, "Thomas Mann’s Unbound Bodies: A Formal Analysis of Disease in The Magic Mountain" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/bb_etds/230
Included in
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