Beauty fascinates and unsettles. In literature and the arts, the beautiful can ennoble and elevate, but beauty's refinement may also turn bloodless, artificial, even depraved. Erotic attraction to beautiful bodies, also sometimes exalting, can by contrast become all too red-blooded and degenerate into sexual obsession. And why do works of art so often link erotic love to tragic death? Do beauty and eros point toward true fulfillment in life -- and is that fulfillment mysteriously linked to mortality? -- or are the promises of beauty and desire just seductive lies masking a truth about existence that we cannot bear to face? These perennial questions are nowhere explored at greater cultural density than in the great short work of modern literature at the center of this seminar's inquiry into beauty, desire and extinction: Thomas Mann's 1912 novella Death in Venice. Mann's story sets into counterpoint an extraordinary array of prior mythic, literary, philosophical, musical, psychological, historical, biographical and visual inquiries into aesthetics, (homo)eroticism and mortality from Ancient Greece up through Mann's own era. Studying these many works, from the drama of Euripides and the philosophy of Plato up through Wagner's operas, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, and early photography of the male nude, together with "Death in Venice" itself and two films and an opera based on it, we will probe enduring questions about the nature and cultural expression of art, life, sexuality and mortality.

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