Summer Symposium
Each summer, the Program of Liberal Studies and General Program alumni/ae gather on Notre Dame's campus, eager to engage their teachers, the authors of the Great Books.
The Program of Liberal Studies coordinates the events which are centered on seminars that explore the week's theme.
Tenth Annual PLS/GP Summer Symposium
Interpretations of the Faust Legend
June 2-6, 2008
We are happy to announce that the Program of Liberal Studies will hold its ninth annual Summer Symposium on campus the week of June 2-6, 2008. By popular demand, we’ve moved the seminar from the week of July 4 to the week immediately following Alumni/ae Reunions. All sessions will be led by PLS faculty.
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Henry Weinfield
Dostoevsky's great novel of sin and redemption, contains a number of motifs that the Russian writer would later develop in The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Raskolnikov, Dostoevsky's protagonist in Crime and Punishment, enters into a "Faustian bargain" by murdering and robbing an old pawnbroker whom he deems worthless and unfit to live. Having embraced nihilism and utilitarianism, along with the idea that "if there is no God, everything is permitted," Raskolnikov finds that he has sold his soul to the devil, ironically by denying the devil's existence. The murder he commits precipitates great moral suffering and, eventually, his path to redemption; for in Dostoevsky's vision, atonement and forgiveness are always possibilities. The novel reinterprets the Faust legend from the standpoint of a crisis of modernity that, from Dostoevsky's perspective, can be resolved only through a return to Christian faith. It is an extraordinary psychological study and one of the most intricately plotted novels in European literature.
One to three sessions
Angels, Sin and the Devil: Selected Questions from Thomas Aquinas's Suuma Theologiae—Bernd Goehring
Marlowe's The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus—Julia Marvin
John Dee—Robert Goulding
Devil's Trills and Soul for Sale: Tartini, Paganni, and the Myth of the Bewitched Violin—Pierpaolo Polzonetti
Faustian Social Science? Its Challenges and Difficulties—
Walter Nicgorski
Faust in Copenhagen—Phillip Sloan
From Sparks of Divine Creative Power to Mechanical Automata, to an Instauration of the Human Inquirer in the Account of Reality in Quantum Mechanics—Felicitas Munzel & Matt Dowd
2008 Summer Symposium Form
Summer Symposium Readings
2008 Seminar Schedule
Area Attractions