Humanities Seminars Course: Faust

Monday, October 5, 2015 - 9:00am to Monday, December 14, 2015 - 12:00pm
Rubel Room, Poetry Center 1508 E. Helen Street Tucson, AZ 85721

MONDAYS 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. October 5 - December 14, 2015. No class on November 23, 2015. Register here.

Tuition: $195

Faust is alive and well. His emanations appear in literature, art, music, film, and cyberspace. Not only Adam and Eve but also Faust ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So he has excited the human imagination for centuries. But who was this mysterious alchemist or learned academician who dared transgress the borders of accepted knowledge and revel in the world of darkness that the Church condemned and warned against?

We will look for him on the Internet, in Marlowe’s Tragical History of Dr. Johann Faust, and in Gounod’s Faust opera, Liszt’s “Faust” symphony, and Wagner’s Faust overture. The main focus of the seminar is on those Fausts entrenched in German culture. Therefore, a significant part of the seminar is devoted to discussions of Goethe’s Faust. And we will look carefully at the novel Doctor Faust, Mann’s devastating criticism of the rise of Nazi Germany.

Required Reading: 

Marlowe, Christopher. The Tragical History of Dr. Johann Faust. In: Doctor Faustus and Other Plays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0199537068.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Faust: Part One. Trans. David Luke. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0199536214.

Gounod, Charles. FaustGounod’s Faust.  Ed. Robert Lawrence. Literary Licensing, LLC, 2011. ISBN: 978-1258183981.

Mann, Thomas. Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Trans. John E. Woods. Vintage International, 1999. ISBN: 978-0375701160.

Recommended Reading: 

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Faust: Part Two. Trans. David Luke. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0199536207.

STEVEN D. MARTINSON is Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona. He has led three Humanities Seminars: Faust, German Literature and Philosophy, and Young Nietzsche, and received a Superior Teaching Award. Martinson is a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a Research Alumnus of Heidelberg University.