Word: prometheus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Perhaps it is too much to suppose that Mary Shelley had her mother in mind when she created the arrogant genius Dr. Frankenstein and subtitled her novel The Modern Prometheus. How much better a tribute than Father Godwin's female Werther: Mary Wollstonecraft, having stolen the fires of social equality for her sex, chained and suffering on the rock of her female biology...
...movie house stands as one of the few refuges of the romantic spirit at Harvard. The inroads made by the realism of preprofessionalism fortunately cannot penetrate this archive of a disappearing Harvard tradition. Perhaps one day the spirit will re-emerge, and, like Shelley's Prometheus, refuse to go to law school...
...written with conspicuous pain by an author who includes himself in the epitaph. Heilbroner fits his own description of Promethean man, full of "driving energy," "nervous will": a problem solver. Now, he grimly concludes, that gift of fire may burn up the world. For the sake of the race Prometheus must go. To be replaced by whom? Atlas, Heilbroner proposes, the burden bearer rather than the problem solver: the man who plays life not to win but to survive. Before a reader is carried away by this bleak neomythology, he should ask: Just what are Heilbroner's deep apprehensions...
...familiar Judaeo-Christian God, Miller asserts, is indeed dead. In Miller's view, he died much as Prometheus warned that Zeus would die: he usurped power over the other gods whose existence nourished his own. This happened, says Miller, because Christian theology, particularly after the Reformation, became dogmatic and narrow. Miller argues that Jesus himself was neither. He proclaimed that there were "many mansions" in his father's house, and in teaching he used a variety of parables. Complains Miller: "Christian theology has reduced those parables to a few creeds, all of which say the same thing." What...
...most academics are too sublimating, is Kott too abominating? Characteristically he keeps his intellectual balance on the brink of nihilism by reaching out, not to Aristotle but to a Resistance fighter named Albert Camus. In paraphrase of Camus, Kott writes: "Prometheus' greatness is his revolt without hope." Like a banner he majestically raises Camus' fine and all-important distinction: "Being deprived of hope is not despairing." No 20th century margin shaver could come closer to making Sophocles a contemporary. Melvin Maddocks