The Faust Theme

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German 2252H The Faust Theme GE course Spring Semester 2013 | 3 credit units T Th 9:35--10:55 This course will be taught in English. Faust, the man who sells his soul to the devil, is one of the few mythical figures created by the modern age. His story has, for hundreds of years, been told and retold in poems, dramas, puppet plays, ballets, novels, paintings, symphonies, book illustrations, operas, and films. Eugene Delacroix, Goethe’s Faust Faust's infinite attractiveness for the arts stems from the very idea he embodies, namely that of struggle. But the forces that are seen at war with each other change with every century, author, and composer. Faith and heresy, hope and nihilism, sensuality and asceticism, love and lust, art and politics – all of these battle for redemption or damnation in different versions of Faust. This course on the Faust theme will thus shed light on the different ages and mentalities that are expressed in each version. From a close study of the many facets of the Faust theme, we will trace an outline of the cultural history of Germany and examine the myth’s reverberations within other cultures over the centuries. This class approaches the Faust theme from a variety of different angles. We will consider its early roots and its first important dramatic embodiment in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus from Elizabethan times. Our main focus will of course be on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, as well as on a late 19th century Gothic re-imagination of the theme: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Our approach to the theme will however also include studying a wide range of representations of the Faust theme in the arts, such as in painting, etching, film and music. still from Friedrich Murnau’s silent movie Faust germanic.osu.edu .

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Goethe, the Japanese National Identity Through Cultural Exchange, 1889 to 1989
Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik pen Jahrgang LI – Heft 1 | Peter Lang, Bern | S. 57–100 Goethe, the Japanese National Identity through Cultural Exchange, 1889 to 1989 By Stefan Keppler-Tasaki and Seiko Tasaki, Tokyo Dedicated to A . Charles Muller on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Tokyo This is a study of the alleged “singular reception career”1 that Goethe experi- enced in Japan from 1889 to 1989, i. e., from the first translation of theMi gnon song to the last issues of the Neo Faust manga series . In its path, we will high- light six areas of discourse which concern the most prominent historical figures resp. figurations involved here: (1) the distinct academic schools of thought aligned with the topic “Goethe in Japan” since Kimura Kinji 木村謹治, (2) the tentative Japanification of Goethe by Thomas Mann and Gottfried Benn, (3) the recognition of the (un-)German classical writer in the circle of the Japanese national author Mori Ōgai 森鴎外, as well as Goethe’s rich resonances in (4) Japanese suicide ideals since the early days of Wertherism (Ueruteru-zumu ウェルテルヅム), (5) the Zen Buddhist theories of Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 and D . T . Suzuki 鈴木大拙, and lastly (6) works of popular culture by Kurosawa Akira 黒澤明 and Tezuka Osamu 手塚治虫 . Critical appraisal of these source materials supports the thesis that the polite violence and interesting deceits of the discursive history of “Goethe, the Japanese” can mostly be traced back, other than to a form of speech in German-Japanese cultural diplomacy, to internal questions of Japanese national identity .
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FAUST'S belong to the devil. The legend spread SELF-REALIZATION to England, where an English poet, Christopher Marlowe, attracted by the FROM A BUDDHIST motive, wrote The History of Dr. PERSPECTIVE Faustus, a tragedy about a man who sells his soul to the devil. It was the English pupet show based on the Faustus Pornsan Watananguhn Jecrendo which Goethe saw in his home- town of Frankfurt when he was young 1 and which inspired him to write The Abstract Tragedy of Faust later in his life. The aim of this paper is to investigate In the opinion of most German literary the differences between "self- realiza critics, Faust reflects the autobiography tion" within Christian-western philoso of this 1:>crreat German Poet. It is believed phy and Faust's self-realization in that Goethe must have read the story of Goethe's tragedy as received and inter Faust and been impressed by the preted in a Buddhist society. Further, the anxiety of a protagonist's thirsty to know article examines in what way the author what a man can not know. The desire to Goethe shows an ironical and critical increase his self-confidence and to attitudes towards Faust's life and how confirm himself through a better can Faust be redeemed from the guilt knowledge of the cosmos and the world and set himself free from the "karma's" leads to Faust's encounter with the devil. law of cause and effect. He gradually comes to depend on the evil spirit. Goethe started to compose Faust's Self-realization from a the Tragedy of Faust when he was 20 Buddhist Perspective during the literary period of "Storm and Stress" in the 18th century and In the 1 sth century, a young boy named completed this lifework, with many Johann Wolfgang Goethe found a small intervals, at the age of 82.
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