Ignoring Goethe's Faust: A Critical-Theoretical Perspective on American Ideology

The neglect of Goethe, his work in general, and Faust in particular, in English-speaking countries, is notorious. While Shakespeare's plays have been prominent and widely performed in German-speaking countries, the same is not true for Goethe in the English-speaking world. Focusing non-exclusively on Faust, and cutting a link to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, I will endeavor to delineate problematic aspects of American ideology, and what it would take, within U.S. sociology, to be cognizant of the latter. Georg Lukacs wrote about Goethe and Faust, and so did Theodor W. Adorno and Leo Loewenthal, highlighting its importance to critical theory. The goal is to delineate a critical theory of American ideology that cannot be developed from a perspective from within the US alone, and of the role Shakespeare's work has been playing in normalizing the prevalence and workings key aspects of this ideology. Author Biography Harry F. Dahms, University of Tennessee Harry F. Dahms is a professor of sociology working in social theory, critical theory, philosophy of social science, and sociology of science fiction at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville, where he is also co-chair of the Committee on Social Theory and co-director of the Center for the Study of Social Justice. He has been an affiliate in Sociology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria since 2010, and previously taught at Florida State University and the University of Göttingen, Germany. He is the editor of Current Perspectives in Social Theory and director of the International Social Theory Consortium, and currently in the process of completing a book, Modern Society as Artifice: Critical Theory and the Logic of Capital (Routledge).