Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers: Writing, Performance, and the Politics of Loyalty

More importantly, in my reading, the terms "writing, performance and the politics of loyalty" miss the strength of the book by underplaying the analytic relationship to Mann the author. Yet this non-causal tool is insufficient for McDonald's purposes, and I myself began to see the necessity of self-influence, or some equivalent causality-based concept, for capturing the movement, or psychological interplay, within Mann's oeuvre, in a way that helps us to understand the process of creation. McDonald sees Mann's Joseph, like Amphitryon, as a figure not dominated by an oedipal complex, but by a tension between innate, narcissistic identity and identity formed through social relations.