Prometheus Bound

Prometheus Bound is part of a trilogy of plays attributed to ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus.
The other two in the trilogy are Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus Pyrphoros.
Prometheus was a Titan who gave the gift of fire to the human race. For this he was punished by
Zeus, the King of Gods. He invited the wrath of Zeus also by holding back the name of the
potential usurper of Zeus' throne, which he knew by merit of his prophetic wisdom.
The play begins when three gods chain Prometheus on to the Caucusses. Throughout the play
the hero is chained and most of the action is revealed through dialogues, monologues, soliloquies
and asides.
Hephaestus sympathizes with Prometheus, but has to chain him by the order of Zeus, the new
ruler of Olympus. He is punished for providing fire to the mortal humans. He then leaves with his
companions Bia and Kratus after advising him to learn to admire the rule of Zeus. Prometheus
invokes nature to witness the suffering of one god at the hands of the others.
Oceanids, the daughters of Oceanus (friend of Prometheus) arrive and console him. To their
enquiry Prometheus recounts how the Titans had refused his help in their fight against Zeus and
how he had helped Zeus win against the Titans. Now like every tyrant, Zeus distrusts him. Also he
had stood against Zeus’ plans of destroying the race of the humans and had given the gift of fire
to them. The chorus of Oceanids opines that he has sinned in doing this.
Then Oceanus himself appears and advises Prometheus not to arouse more wrath of Zeus
through his arrogant words. He offers to mediate with Zeus, but Prometheus warns him not to
involve himself in danger by intervening when the time is unripe.
The Chorus sings that the whole world mourns the fate of Prometheus and his brothers tortured
by Zeus, especially Atlas who has to bear the earth on his shoulders. Prometheus narrates
everything he has done for humanity- he gave them fire, hope; he taught them agriculture,
mining, languages, mathematics… and what not. The Oceanids affirm loyalty to Zeus and scolds
him for his unwise helping of the mortals who cannot help him back.
Next visitor is io whom Zeus had pursued once and had converted into a cow. Prometheus tells Io
of her future wanderings through Europe, Asia, and Africa, where she must constantly avoid
dangerous peoples and monsters. He also tell her that her descendant will free him from the
torments of Zeus. At the end of her suffering Zeus will cure and impregnate her with a gentle
touch of his hand. Prometheus talks about Io's descendants, who will become kings of the city
Argos. Io runs off again tortured by the gadfly.
Angered by Io's suffering, Prometheus shouts out that Zeus's own son will topple him.
Zeus sends his messenger Hermes to Prometheus and demands to know the name of the person
who is bound to overthrow him. Prometheus is still defiant. Hermes warns that he will be sent to
Tartarus, the abyss. Then an eagle will eat his lungs the whole day, it will grow at the night for the
eagle to prick on the coming day. This torture will go on until some god volunteers to die for him.
The Oceanids advice him to yield; but he is undaunted. Hermes warns the Oceanids; but they
stay back by Prometheus saying that to desert a friend in difficulty is the worst crime. The earth
shivers; thunderstorms gather; Prometheus invokes nature to witness his suffering.
The sequels to the play tell the rest of the story and vindicate Prometheus's prophetic powers.

Mythologies – Roland Barthes

Mythologies is a collection of essays by the consummate essay writer Roland Barthes,
written between 1954 and 56. It covers a wide array of subjects from the French cultural
life as divergent as the iconic image of Greta Garbo, the marketing of cars, detergents and
literary genre, alien invaders etc. These essays examine the tendency of contemporary
social systems to create modern myths. Barthes also looks at the semiology of myth
creation. In this, he updates on the studies and theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and
Claude Levi Strauss and poses as a prototype of cultural studies.
He looks for the meaning of almost anything around him. Edward Said says of this: “. .
For Barthes, words and objects have in common the organized capacity to say something;
at the same time, since they are signs, words and objects have the bad faith always to
appear natural to their consumer, as if what they say is eternal, true, necessary, instead of
arbitrary, made, contingent.”
The mythologies essays have been translated into English by Annette Lavers (in the same
title) and by Richard Howard (titled The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies). The Eiffel
Tower collection has five other essays not present in the original French: “The Two
Salons”, “Dining Car”, “Cottage Industry”, “Buffet Finishes Off New York” and “Eiffel
Tower”. Eiffel Tower, considered among the most beautiful essays by Barthes, explores
the status of the tower as a big void, yet unavoidable; neither functional nor artisitic, but
an elemental presence as a cultural symbol and archetectural relic.
An often quoted example of the general tone and theme of Mythologies is “The World of
Wrestling”. Like his later structural analyses of narratives, Barthes examines the
complicated set of codes operating in “all-in-wrestling”. He distinguishes between boxing
as a sport and wrestling as a theatrical form. Like the characters of a novel, wrestlers
make complex series of moves according to their character, all known to the audience.
These characters are types as in a traditional pantomime: the clown, the bastard, the
traitor and the like. The scruples of the French society get reflected in these stage shows
by the wrestlers. And “wrestling fans certainly experience a kind of intellectual pleasure
seeing the moral mechanism function so perfeclty.”

A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolfe

“A Room of One's Own” is a long essay compiled from a series of lectures by Virginia
Woolf on the topic of Women and Fiction. In the lectures delivered at Newnham College
and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in 1928, she puts up
that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Part
feminist manifesto, part literary theory, “A Room of One's Own” is about feminism,
about independence, about writing, about becoming one's own person.
The acute satire on the male chauvinism of contemporary university education also
popularised the hybrid ‘Oxbridge’ to signify both the classical universities- Oxford and
Cambridge. Its examination of sexist discrimination in society, literature and art formed
the foundation of modern feminist thinking.
An imaginary narrator ("call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any
name you please—it is not a matter of any importance") at Oxbridge College, reflects on
the discriminate educational and material experiences tended to men and women.
Woolfe paints how the female is hoodwinked by the paradoxes of fiction and real life: "A
very queer, composite being emerges. Imaginatively, she is of the highest importance;
practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she
is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction;
in fact she was a slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger."
Woolfe creates Judith Shakespeare, a fictional sister to the great Bard, to illustrate that a
woman with equal gifts would not have access to the same opportunities because of the
doors closed to women.
Even when women began writing fiction, they were terribly under the spell of patriarchal
notions of virtue and the modest role of women. Thus, Woolf suggests there could have
been no female Shakespeare in sixteenth century England. She notes of Charlotte Bronte,
"she knew, no one better, how enormously her genius would have profited if it had not
spent itself in solitary visions over distant fields; if experience and intercourse and travel
had been granted her. But they were not granted, they were withheld."
The fullness of the real world can be communicated only by writers who are great
androgynous minds. Shakespeare, Keats, Sterne, Cowper, Lamb, Coleridge, and Proust
she places in this category.
Examining the careers of several female authors, including Jane Austen, the Brontë
sisters and George Eliot, with supreme irony and sarcasm over the male-female power
dichotomy she establishes that to be a successful writer, a woman needs space in which to
work and money backing.
The essay ends with an exhortation to women to take up the tradition so hardly
bequeathed to them by rare and few women who excelled in writing, and to increase the
endowment for their own daughters.

ORIENTALISM – Edward Said

Born of Palestinian father and Lebanese mother, Edward Said is an American citizen. He
is professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and is
renowned globally in various capacities as literary and cultural theorist, as an outspoken
Palestinian activist, as the pioneer of post-colonial theory. Men like Derrida, Foucault,
Tibawi, Malek-Abdel and Rodinson had triggered the wisdom and thought processes of
Said, though some of them were critical of his views at a later time.
His celebrated work Orientalism (1978) criticized the poor understanding of the Arab
culture in the West. The book is very much tied to the tumultuous dynamics of
contemporary history. It exerted a significant impact on the fields of literary and cultural
studies.
In “Orientalism” Said argued that all Western perceptions of the East cannot be taken at
face value. He perceived "Orientalism", as a host of false assumptions and romanticized
images underlying Western attitudes towards the East.
"Occident" is his term for the West (England, France, and the United States), and "Orient"
is the term for the romantic and misunderstood Middle East and Far East. According to
Said, the Middle East and Asia are viewed with prejudice and racism. To substitute their
ignorance of their own history and culture, the West has created a culture, history, and
future promise for them.
For many, Islamism is still seen through the history scribed by Westerners (as the heathen
Crusaders), and not as followers of a religion that shares much with both Judaism and
Christianity. Immense ignorance about reality is what prompts this inaccurate, prejudiced
view.
Orientalism is more an indicator of the power the West holds over the Orient, than about
the Orient itself. By taking control of the scholarship, the West also took political and
economic control.
Criticisms
Chief criticisms raised against Said’s arguments in “Orientalism” are:
a. Said’s theory of 2000 years of Western domination in the East is false. Until the
late 17th century the Turkish Ottoman Empire was a great power threatening
European powers.
 b. Even at its peak, European imperial domination was dependent on local powers
and local wisdom.
c. Said’s focus on Palestine and Egypt were politically motivated. These were
colonized for only around a hundred years from the late 19th century. British
domination in the Indian sub-continent and the Russian invasions in various parts
of Asia were more prolonged and intense.
d. Said ignored the powerful Oriental studies of German and Hungarian scholars for
convinience of argument, because these two countries had no colonies in the East.
e. People of the Said school are rather obsessed with the portrayal of the orient in
films and popular media rather than serious and well-meaning academic studies.
Towards the end of his life, even Said himself had turned critical of the postcolonial
theory. Flawed or otherwise, positive or not, his book Orientalism has had profound and
transformative influence across the spectrum of the Humanities.