Goethe’s Faust: Knowledge, Striving, Bliss

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.

All Graham School courses use Canvas to distribute files and announcements. You will receive an invitation to join Canvas about a week before your course begins. Remote courses require you to login to Canvas to access the Zoom Classroom. Please visit the Liberal Arts Remote Learning Resources page to find step by step instructions for Canvas and Zoom.