Leseprobe
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The Sin of Knowledge
Theodore Ziolkowski
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Belletristik / Essays, Feuilleton, Literaturkritik, Interviews
Beschreibung
Adam, Prometheus, and Faust--their stories were central to the formation of Western consciousness and continue to be timely cautionary tales in an age driven by information and technology. Here Theodore Ziolkowski explores how each myth represents a response on the part of ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek, and sixteenth-century Christian culture to the problem of knowledge, particularly humankind's powerful, perennial, and sometimes unethical desire for it. This book exposes for the first time the similarities underlying these myths as well as their origins in earlier trickster legends, and considers when and why they emerged in their respective societies. It then examines the variations through which the themes have been adapted by modern writers to express their own awareness of the sin of knowledge.
Each myth is shown to capture the anxiety of a society when faced with new knowledge that challenges traditional values. Ziolkowski's examples of recent appropriations of the myths are especially provocative. From Voltaire to the present, the Fall of Adam has provided an image for the emergence from childhood innocence into the consciousness of maturity. Prometheus, as the challenger of authority and the initiator of technological evil, yielded an ambivalent model for the socialist imagination of the German Democratic Republic. And finally, an America unsettled by its responsibility for the atomic bomb, and worrying that in its postwar prosperity it had betrayed its values, recognized in Faust the disturbing image of its soul.
Kundenbewertungen
Seminar, Science policy, Trickster, Writer, Americans, Prometheus, Felix culpa, The Golden Pot, Epimetheus (mythology), The Birth of Tragedy, Tragicomedy, Analogy, Secularization, Bronze sculpture, Misery (novel), Claudia Schiffer, Prometheus Bound, Goethe's Faust, Novel, Forbidden Knowledge, Morality play, Protoplast, Prometheus Unbound (Aeschylus), Tragic hero, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mythopoeia, Forbidden knowledge, Philosophy, Enkidu, Mephistopheles, John Hersey, Allusion, Karl Shapiro, Doctor Faustus (play), Deal with the Devil, Hesiod, Osamu Tezuka, Religion, Poetry, Karl Lagerfeld, Chapbook, Sophocles, Volker Braun, Makapansgat, Masaccio, Satanism, Demian, Satire, Arno Breker, Faust, Lecture, Good and evil, Theogony, Literature, The Various, Prometheus Unbound (Shelley), Parody, Phenomenon, Oswald Spengler, Aeschylus, Call girl, Peter Hacks, Anecdote, Gertrude Stein, Jack Kerouac, Doctor Sax, Narrative, Ambivalence, Candide, Anne Sexton