Alienated Hero in European Lit (IHENG-391)

Outsiders, dissenters, introverts, lone wolves and other misfits, alienated from their communities, from tradition, from nature and from themselves, populate European literature from the 18th century onwards. The course will consider such classical portraits of the alienated hero as Goethe's Faust (Faust), Lermontov's Pechorin (A Hero of Our Time), Turgenev's Superfluous Man (The Diary of a Superfluous Man), Kafka's Joseph K (The Trial), Nabokov's Cincinnatus C (Invitation to the Beheading), and Camus's Meursault (The Stranger).