The Faust legend poses fundamental questions about the nature and value of knowledge, about good and evil, about the divine, the demonic, and their interrelationship. It has become one of the Western cultural tradition’s most ubiquitous myths; yet unlike most of those myths, this one is distinctly modern, having been born in the early Renaissance. This course will choose some of the most provocative and influential iterations of the theme. We encourage students to approach the subject from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: literary, musical, historical, artistic, philosophical, religious, scientific.
