The sin of knowledge
Subtitle: ancient themes and modern variations
By: Theodore Ziolkowski.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Princeton
Language: eng
Number of pages: 222
Subjects: Adam (Biblical figure) -- In literature; Faust, d. ca. 1540 -- In literature; Mythology in literature; Prometheus (Greek deity) in literature
Description: "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."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-216) and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: PRELUDE; title: The Timeless Topicality of Myth; title: PART ONE; title: ANCIENT THEMES; title: CHAPTER ONE; title: Adam: The Genesis of Consciousness; title: The Biblical Fall; title: Near Eastern Sources; title: The Paradox of Knowledge in Solomon'sJerusalem; title: CHAPTER Two; title: Prometheus: The Birth of Civilization; title: Hesiod's Trickster; title: Aeschylus's Culture-Hero; title: From Boeotia to Athens; title: CHAPTER THREE; title: Faust: The Ambivalence of Knowledge; title: The Historical Faust; title: The Growth of the Legend; title: The Chapbook Speculator; title: Marlowe's Power Seeker; title: INTERLUDE; title: From Myth to Modernity; title: PART TWO; title: MODERN VARIATIONS; title: CHAPTER FOUR; title: The Secularization of Adam; title: Candide's Fall; title: The Typological Impulse; title: Romantic Tragicomic Falls; title: Modern Ironies; title: CHAPTER FIVE; title: The Proletarianization of Prometheus; title: From Myth to Marx; title: Modern Metaphors; title: Marxist Myths; title: GDR Ambiguities; title: Three Major Re-Visions; title: The Enemy of the People; title: CHAPTER SIX; title: The Americanization of Faust; title: Modernizations of the Myth; title: Faust and the Bomb; title: Playful Fausts of the Fifties; title: A Blue-Collar Faust; title: Professorial Fausts; title: Fausts of Politics and Poetry; title: Fausts for the Nineties; title: POSTLUDE; title: On the Uses and Abuses of Myth; title: Notes; title: Bibliography; title: Index.