Download or read book Thomas Mann's Joseph und Seine Brüder and the Phallic Theology of the Old Testament written by George Bridges and published by Peter Lang Group Ag, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1995 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Thomas Mann began to work on his Joseph novel, he was motivated to do so by the image of the beautiful seventeen-year-old youth and the erotic attraction this image exercised on him personally. He undertook to retell the biblical story of Joseph in order to explore the meaning of this attraction. In the phallic theology of the Old Testament - Israel's covenant with Yahweh was a sacred marriage, outwardly marked by circumcision, for the purpose of mutual sanctification and aggrandizement - Mann discovered the framework of a metaphysics of homoerotic desire. This book explores the many implications Mann found in his biblical source, including the paradoxical notion that a certain degree of suppression of the original desire is required if it is to continue to play its all-important role as a motivating force.