Document Type

Syllabus

Publication Date

Spring 2024

Course Description

My dear brethren, when you hear the progress of knowledge praised, do not ever forget that the Devil’s cleverest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist! Charles Baudelaire, “The Generous Gambler” (1864) Not for a moment do I accept that you really exist. You’re a lie, you’re my illness, you’re a ghost. Only I don’t know how to get rid of you, so I can see I’ll have to put up with you for a while. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brother Karamazov (1880) Any good plot has its protagonist and its antagonist. This course is about The Antagonist. The Adversary. The Enemy. The Tempter. The Trickster. Satan. Lucifer. Mephistopheles. The Inflatable Demon in the ice bath in the Ninth Circle of Hell. He has many names, and we will survey the world’s literary registry of them. We begin with his origins in the ancient Middle East, tracing his emergence in the Bible. We then follow his ascendance as the celebrated and scorned supervillain of the Western literary canon, in Dante’s The Inferno, Mil- ton’s Paradise Lost, and Goethe’s Faust. From the nineteenth century to the present, literature reflects his face in dizzying kaleido- scope, which we will glimpse in works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Baudelaire, Mark Twain, C.S. Lewis, Mikhail Bulgakov, William Peter Blatty, Cormac McCarthy, and Jesmyn Ward. We will also note his prominent role in selected historical spasms, from waves witch hunting in Europe and Salem, to blood libel conspiracy theories, to the more recent satanic panics inflamed by Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal music. Finally, we will sample his many Hollywood turns. Through this survey, we will see that his purpose is as plastic as his form, as we make him the dark icon of whatever troubles us then and there. He is the worst part of us that we’re always trying to exorcize, and yet, as our great Antagonist, he gives us purpose.

Student Outcomes

In our course, the content becomes a medium for developing your intellectual abilities through writing. Writing in any genre is a creative act of ordering and deriving deeper meaning from the thoughts and impressions that constitute our basic response to experience, including reading literature. The purpose of the course is to understand portrayals of the Devil in literature spanning two millennia and diverse languages and cultures. The course will to help you (1) to discern the historical origins and formation of these portrayals, (2) to find patterns between literary depictions of the Devil produced by different writers in different periods, and (4) to write with sources and critical perspectives.

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