Artificial I’s: The Self as Artwork in Ovid, Kierkegaard, and Thomas Mann

This study explores three works in which the protagonist undertakes to fashion a literary artwork out of himself: Ovid’s Ars Amatoria , Kierkegaard’s Diary of the Seducer , and Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull . For each work, particular attention is paid to the self-conscious interplay between the author’s project of book-making and the character’s project of self-making, as well as to the effect of changing notions of self-identity on the protagonist’s attempt at life as literature. For Felix Krull , this includes a sustained analysis of Mann’s incorporation and problematization of various Nietzschean models of aesthestics, reality, and self-identity. In Ovid and Kierkegaard, this study also considers a related project, the attempt to fashion a literary artwork out of another, namely out of a woman.