English 4

Dr. Murphy

Frakenrichment

The Faustus/Frankenstein connection

  • Remember what the great Enlightenment thinker, JJ Rouseau, said: “Dare to Know.” This is a great motto and a value for scholars everywhere. However, as we have seen, it’s not as simple as that. Consider the following bits of text and information for tomorrow’s (Tuesday’s) seminar.
  • Be Prepared. I will not be lecturing…you will be seminaring.

The Faustus tradition is rather instructive here: This Wikipedia entry is credible:

Here’s an interesting riff from someone in the Engineering school at the University of Houston.

We’ll see these in class tomorrow; clips from a movie based on the Robert Johnson legend (and the Faustus, the Frankenstein, and the “Devil and Tom Walker” too…): meeting the Devil at the “Crossroads” and selling one’s soul for knowledge, power, and/or fame.

And don’t forget Prometheus and all that the Myth means to this topic (Remember: the subtitle to Shelley’s novel is “The Modern Prometheus.”)

A solid presentation of the myth. Great paintings!

Check this out: a well-known professor form Cal (Mark Danner) has a course on our topic (which is to say, this is what English 4 looks like when one gets to university…if one is lucky!) Here’s the syllabus.

From the Hebrew Scriptures:

Eccl 1:12-18

“I, Qoheleth, was king over Israel in Jerusalem, and I applied my mind to search and investigate in wisdom all things that are done under the sun. A thankless task God has appointed for men to be busied about. I have seen all things that are done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a chase after wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is missing cannot be supplied. Though I said to myself, "Behold, I have become great and stored up wisdom beyond all who were before me in Jerusalem, and my mind has broad experience of wisdom and knowledge"; yet when I applied my mind to know wisdom and knowledge, madness and folly, I learned that this also is a chase after wind. For in much wisdom there is much sorrow, and he who stores up knowledge stores up grief.”

From the Christian Scriptures:

Matthew 6:33

“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

A perspective from the Theosophists…

Other Points of View:

The utmost extent of man's knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.
* Joseph Addison

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.
* Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky

A man can only attain knowledge with the help of those who possess it. This must be understood from the very beginning. One must learn from him who knows.
* George Gurdjieff

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?
* Maria Montessori

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.
* Laurence Sterne

We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.
* Mark Twain

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating--people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
* Oscar Wilde