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But from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat" (Gen. 2:17). This interdisciplinary course explores the theme of forbidden knowledge in the various forms it takes in the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Greek tragedy, folklore and folktale, and in western literary classics ranging from Milton's Paradise Lost through the versions of the Faust story in Marlowe, Goethe, and Thomas Mann, to short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. What do we make of the parallels between the Greek hero Prometheus and the Biblical Satan? How are we to understand the figure of Dr. Frankenstein as "the Modern Prometheus"? Does Faust's pursuit of conventionally forbidden areas of knowledge anticipate 20th and 21st century quests to unveil the secrets of nuclear power, or of artificial intelligence, or of genetic engineering of the human genome? In addition to our literary readings, we will discuss a variety of operas and other relevant musical works; films from Bride of Frankenstein and Dr. Strangelove, to Hannibal; and transgressive visual imagery from Paleolithic cave art to the work of contemporary performance artists – in a collective quest to find and define the boundaries of "the forbidden."