ABSTRACT
In his Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Mikhail Bakhtin refers several times to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. In her discussion of the dialectics in Doctor Faustus, Ella Belfer not only analyzes the novel's treatment of the duality of good and evil, redemption and damnation, but also demonstrates how the work establishes a dialectic between absolutism and relativism. Henry James's The Golden Bowl can be read as taking up a fairy tale "plot" that has been left open as it was in Royal Highness. Examining the "entanglement between love and power in The Golden Bowl, " Mark Seltzer writes about Maggie Verver's "immanent policing," which, allowing for "neither overt recognition nor protests," and "at once insidious and irreproachable," is the manifestation of a "power" that "constructs a prison cage." Like the golden bowl in James's novel, Leverkuhn as the object of Zeitblom's "Life" is re-created by his biographer as a literary text, which is subsequently re-interpreted by the reader.
