A Ironia de Sereus Zeitblom

Abstract

This article focuses on an issue and a literary work: skepticism and Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann. This association is not merely accidental but resides in a circumstance established by modern art. The so-called modern art, inasmuch as it abolishes the criteria to assess a work of art, it ruins the possibility of art being a function of knowledge. Hence, as Thomas Mann theorizes, through Doctor Faustus, the impossibility of art in a moment that “Art becomes criticism” (MANN, 2000, p. 338); this paper aims at studying the relationship between skepticism which enters the field of art and the instability of Serenus Zeitblom’s writing. Thomas Mann, by turning the Faustian problem into an artistic one, seems to understand that, in the socalled modernity, art is only possible on the verge of its impossibility