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Group Work-in-Progress

WEEK 1

The twenty-four years are up and Faustus is dragged down to Hell. On the morning after the grizzly night before, three scholars visit Faust's study.

               O, help us, heaven! See, here are Faustus' limbs,

               All torn asunder by the hands of death. (B-Text, 5.3.6-7)

Or as the English Faust Book more graphically relates:

            But when it was day the students, that had taken no rest that night, arose and went into the hall in the which they left Doctor Faustus, where notwithstanding they found no Faustus, but all the hall lay besprinkled with blood, his brains cleaving to the wall: for the devil had beaten him from one wall to another, in one corner lay his eyes, in another his teeth... (Chapter 63)

In our first week, we began by looking at the scattered limbs of the Faust myth, the disjecta membra of four hundred years of art, religion, superstition and history. Each of three groups was given a range of images and texts (downloadable below) and asked to arrange the fragments into a spatial - and therefore meaningful - relationship. The results can be glimpsed in the slightly blurry images below.


Download Faust Disjecta Membra / Theory Building Kit

Theory 1

Theory 2Theory 3


Week 3:

Dr James Hodkinson (Assistant Professor, German):

Powerpoint: Re-Germanicizing the Myth: Goethe's Faust

Week 4:

Group Presentations


Group 1 Powerpoint: Who is/was Mephistopheles?

Group 3 Powerpoint: Mephistopheles in Popular Culture


Week 6:

Individual Study: Faust Books


Week 7:

Dr Matthew Broome (Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Warwick Medical School)

POWERPOINT: Medicine, Magic and the Scientific Revolution