Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography - Softcover

Shattuck, Roger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156005514 ISBN 13: 9780156005517

Publisher: Harper Paperbacks, 1997

Synopsis

In his “best achievement to date” (Harold Bloom), National Book Award- winner Roger Shattuck gives us a “deeply learned, highly intelligent, and beautifully written” (New York Times) study of human curiosity versus the taboo, from Adam and Eve to the Marquis de Sade to biotechnology research. Index.

About this title

Review

An intellectual tour-de-force, Forbidden Knowledge is a study of the ethics of literary and scientific inquiry. Shattuck first approaches his subject indirectly, conducting an engaging tour of Western literature: Adam and Eve, Prometheus, Milton's Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He then uses these tales to address the moral questions raised by mankind's tendency to search for dangerous knowledge. He contrasts J. Robert Oppenheimer's acceptance of guilt for the atomic bombings with Edward Teller's dismissal of the same. In his own field of literary criticism he argues against the neutral analysis of immoral works as "pure literature," illustrating his point with a critique of the Marquis de Sade. Forbidden Knowledge is a stimulating and forceful intellectual argument against moral relativism, as well as a practical approach to difficult ethical problems, from genetic engineering to pornography.

About the Author

Mr. Roger Shattuck's scholarly contributions included writing three books on Marcel Proust, one of which won a National Book Award in 1975. His intellectual journey included a groundbreaking work on the rise of the avant-garde in France in the decades preceding World War I and a provocative examination of the famed "Wild Boy of Aveyron" as a study of how humans develop intelligence. In all, he wrote 16 books, including six translations.

Roger Shattuck, a polyglot scholar and writer whose many subjects ranged from the emergence of modernism to whether some knowledge might be too dangerous to know, died on Thursday at his home in Lincoln, Vt. He was 82.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0156005514
• ISBN 13: 9780156005517
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 384