Goethe's Faust Part 2 is arguably his true Faust. A wild fragmentary mixture of alchemy, finance, progress, and myth colliding. In this course we will move act by act: from the Emperor’s court and the birth of paper/fiat money, through the production of the homunculus, through the Classical Walpurgis Night and Faust's relationship with Helen, to Faust's late-life ambition and land-development schemes; in order to see the entirety of Faust as the myth of how we became modern. We will be reading the text closely spending two weeks on each act. Expect wild discussions on this whirlwind of a text which we have not even begun to come to terms with.
By the end of this course, you’ll be fluent in Goethe's Faust 2 and thus also with reading such multi-layered texts. You'll create a keen eye for understanding how the modern world works, from power, credit, technology, to nation-building. You’ll learn to connect court politics to modern monetary policy, visionary projects to environmental engineering and urban planning, and seductive bargains to leadership ethics and innovation culture. And also see which relationship we can still have with Antiquity.
Goethe's Faust Part 2 is one of the most pivotal mythopoetic works of modernity. As such we will understand it as a work that writes our destiny.
You want to understand what it means to be of this age. You want to grasp what made modernity and where it might be going.
