Sin of Knowledge

Ancient Themes and Modern Variations

Inbunden, Engelska, 2000

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Beskrivning

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.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2000-11-12
Mått:152 x 235 x undefined mm
Vikt:482 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:210
Förlag:Princeton University Press
ISBN:9780691050652

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Mer om författaren

Theodore Ziolkowski is Class of 1900 Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University and is the author of many books. His books published by Princeton University Press include Virgil and the Moderns, The View from the Tower, and The Mirror of Justice, which received Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Award.

Recensioner i media

"The rich and original fruit of life-long learning, teaching and research... [An] enlightening study."--Leslie Schenk, World Literature Today "The great pleasures of this book are in its retellings of stories, seamlessly interwoven with commentary."--Larry D. Bouchard, Journal of Religion

Innehållsförteckning

List of Illustrations ix Preface xi PRELUDE: The Timeless Topicality of Myth 3 PART ONE: ANCIENT THEMES 7 CHAPTER ONE: Adam: The Genesis of Consciousness 9 The Biblical Fall 9 Near Eastern Sources 13 The Paradox of Knowledge in Solomon's Jerusalem 17 CHAPTER TWO: Prometheus: The Birth of Civilization 25 Hesiod's Trickster 25 Aeschylus's Culture-Hero 32 From Boeotia to Athens 39 CHAPTER THREE: Faust: The Ambivalence of Knowledge 43 The Historical Faust 43 The Growth of the Legend 49 The Chapbook Speculator 52 Marlowe's Power Seeker 60 INTERLUDE: From Myth to Modernity 69 PART TWO: MODERN VARIATIONS 73 CHAPTER FOUR: The Secularization of Adam Candide's Fall 75 The Typological Impulse 77 Romantic Tragicomic Falls 82 American Ambiguities 92 Modern Ironies 100 CHAPTER FIVE: The Proletarianization of Prometheus 111 From Myth to Marx 111 Modern Metaphors 115 Marxist Myths 121 GDR Ambiguities 127 Three Major Re-Visions 132 The Enemy of the People 141 CHAPTER SIX: The Americanization of Faust 149 Modernizations of the Myth 149 Faust and the Bomb 153 Playful Fausts of the Fifties 156 A Blue-Collar Faust 161 Professorial Faults 164 Faults of Politics and Poetry 174 Fausts for the Nineties 177 POSTLUDE: On the Uses and Abuses of Myth 183 Notes 193 Bibliography 205 Index 217