English Courses

Study of works in world literature emphasizing a global context. Examples include The Bildungsroman, Representations of the Artist, The Global Avant-Garde, The Great Novel, and Global Science Fiction.

Spring Semester information

396A: AdvTps in World Lit: The Devil

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 biblical books of Genesis, Job, the Gospels, and Revelations. We then follow his ascendance as the celebrated and scorned supervillain of the Western literary canon, in Dante's The Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Goethe's Faust. From the nineteenth century to the present, literature reflects his face in dizzying kaleidoscope, which we will glimpse in works by William Blake, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Mark Twain, C.S. Lewis, Mikhail Bulgakov, James Baldwin, William Peter Blatty, Cormac McCarthy, Ben Okri, and Beth Underdown. 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, including Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Witch. 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. In this sense, he is the worst part of us that we're always trying to exorcize.