Dr. Simon Richter Professor of German and Environmental Humanities University of Pennsylvania Tuesday, February 7, 2017 - 4:30pm Miller Learning Center, Room 214 Lecture Can a major work of world literature from the nineteenth century speak to us today about how to live in the age of climate change? Goethe’s Faust, the sprawling tragedy of a man’s relentless striving for knowledge, may at once be the most universal and the most personal work of literature ever written. Through its remarkably expansive sense of the “here and now” of the act of reading, it offers us a way to orient ourselves relative to evolutionary history, global warming and sea level rise. No prior knowledge of Goethe’s Faust is required. We’ll get all the help we need from the hiccups we’ll encounter.
