the Faustian bargain has come to mean

Faust

Faust exchanges his soul for knowledge and pleasure

Rembrandt's late self-portraits achieve

Rembrandt's late self-portraits achieve unflinching honesty about aging, failure, and mortality

Dickinson's dashes do

Dickinson's dashes fracture syntax to mirror the fluidity of thought

Crime and Punishment

Raskolnikov plans to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker to liberate himself from poverty

DeLillo's White Noise examines

White Noise explores the fear of death through consumer culture and media noise

Oedipus complex

Oedipus Rex illustrates the inevitability of fate