Uso e manipolazione delle fonti nella tetralogia 'Joseph und seine Brüder' di Thomas Mann: Metodo compositivo e strategia autoriale

The article is a brief survey of Thomas Mann’s biblical tetralogy Joseph und seine Brüder, concerning, above all, his employment of the manifold literary sources, from which he draws inspiration and whose contents he transfuses into his own work. The main target of this short essay is to describe the author’s technique of expanding the somewhat scanty plot of the stories of Jacob and his favourite son Joseph, by interweaving the biblical narrative structure with a lot of ‘associative digressions’, secondary plots and episodes, which he derives, not only from biblical and postbiblical judaism, but also from the patristic exegesis of the Holy Writ and even from the mythic and symbolic world of classical antiquity, from the imagery of the Ancient Near East, from Gnosticism and from many other religious, philosophical and cosmological systems. This syncretistic intertextuality, this arbitrary amalgamation and anachronistic juxtaposition of narrative elements are the distinguishing feature of Mann’s biblical epos, which is based on an archetypical conception of the world, on the concept of circularity and on the myth of ‘eternal return’.