BASC70265 - Goethe’s Faust: Knowledge, Striving, Bliss
4785687
Delivery Options
Online
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Course Description
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust is the work not only of a poet but also of a scientist, statesman, autobiographer, novelist, painter, art collector – in short, the work of a polymath. Like Dante’s Divine Comedy and Shakespeare’s plays, Faust is encyclopedic in scope. In a kaleidoscopic array of verse forms and literary genres, it reflects and refracts the writer’s myriad preoccupations. It is the work of a lifetime, owing its earliest impressions to the poet’s childhood memories of the Faust legend performed as a puppet play and receiving its finishing touches a few weeks before the poet’s death at the age of 83. Faust is a tragedy of human striving that asks after the nature and possibility of happiness on earth. The scholar Faust makes a wager with the devil: if Mephistopheles will enable him to experience a moment of supreme bliss on earth, his soul will be delivered to hell at his death. In this course, we will read Faust I and Faust II in its entirety, following the titular (anti-)hero’s journey through the history of the world as Goethe conceived it.Notes
Online registration closes September 24 at 5 pm CT.
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