From Faust to the Berlin Wall

Catalog description

From Faust to the Berlin Wall (3) This course explores key moments in the history and culture of Germanic Europe from medieval times to reunified Germany through a survey of literature, art, intellectual history, and cinema, using Goethe's Faust as a way to focus on key questions of knowledge, passion, transformation, violence, and tragedy. The course introduces students to the innovative and often provocative activity in literature, the arts, and intellectual history during different eras from the Middle Ages, Northern European Renaissance and Reformation Europe to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and provides a model of cultural analysis. Students acquire conceptual tools to analyze power relations within a cultural landscape where writers, artists, and thinkers are both informed by structures of power and, as is often the case, push back against them. The course examines the construction of gender roles, religious and philosophical conflict, the persecution of outsiders, fascism and genocide, political oppression under authoritarian governments, and the marginal position of minority groups. AU Core Habits of Mind: Cultural Inquiry. Note: Language of Instruction: English.