the Faustian bargain has come to mean

Faust

Faust exchanges his soul for knowledge and pleasure

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

Rembrandt's late self-portraits achieve

Why Rembrandt's late self-portraits reveal more than just beauty?

DeLillo's White Noise examines

Can consumer culture drown out our fear of death?

Oedipus complex

Oedipus Rex illustrates the inevitability of fate