Goethe's Faust: Knowledge, Striving, Bliss

Course Number

LIT6-10-Thu3

Study Group Leader (SGL)

Simon Friedland

Location

This course will take place virtually on Zoom. Participation in this course requires a device (ideally a computer or tablet, rather than a cell phone) with a camera and microphone in good working order and basic familiarity with using Zoom and accessing email.  

10-Week Course

10 week course - March 13  - May 22

(No Class April 17)
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.

Group Leadership Style

More facilitated discussion than lecture.

Course Materials

Faust Part One. Goethe. David Luke, translator. Oxford World’s Classics. 2008. ISBN-13: 9780199536214

Faust Part Two. Goethe. David Luke, translator. Oxford World’s Classics. 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0199536207

Preparation Time

30-60 pages of reading per week.  ~90 minutes of preparation time per class.

Biography

 Simon Friedland received his Ph.D. in German Studies from the University of Chicago in 2021. His research focuses on poetry and poetics in the Age of Goethe (1760-1830). He currently teaches in the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago’s Graham School.