Session 5: Marshall Berman

This reading is the three chapters on the story of Faust by Goethe, as retold by Marshall Berman in what has become a standard text on (as it says on the cover) 'the experience of modernity'.
It is a slightly longer reading than previously, and is downloadable via your booklist on moodle. It is important to register the three sections; dreamer, lover and developer which are Berman's interpretation of the great work by Goethe which took him pretty much all his life to write, and that encompassed pretty much everything he saw on the horizon whilst he was writing it! There is also an epilogue to those three sections you might want to look at too.

Notes for Dissertation 5: 

Only this morning I was helping a student with his plan of work for his dissertation, his subject being the notion of 'community' in a Welsh mining town, and of course I found myself referring him back to the session on Faust, where development comes under such clear scrutiny. My conclusion was that 'community' was not so much 'created' (as 'desire' might have it today) as in actuality 'pressed'. Understanding this would seem, indeed, critical.